This first study on contemporary Arabic exile poetry focuses on four poets who contributed essentially to the innovation of the contemporary Arabic “Qa“īda”: Sa ͑dī Yūsuf (b. 1934) and Kamāl Sabtī (1955–2006) from Iraq as well as Zakariyyā Muḥammad (b. 1951) and Ghassān Zaqṭān (b. 1954) from Palestine. The comparative work offers a profound interpretation and exhaustive analysis of the main features, topics and motifs relevant to Arabic exile poetry today making use of postcolonial (Homi Bhabha), deconstructivist (Jacques Derrida) and hermeneutic (Paul Ricoeur) theories. Oscillating between the loss of identity and its recovery, between nostalgic and traumatic remembrance both of their past and their homelands, the poets strive to find new poetic and meta-poetic forms and linguistic expressions for a world experienced as being out of joint.

Der Blick auf ausgewählte Werke türkischer Gegenwartsautorinnen und -autoren offenbart eine Literatur mit kosmopolitischem Anspruch, die sich den thematisch wie sprachlich engen Grenzen einer national beziehungsweise idealistisch aufgeladenen Literatur verweigert. Der Roman soll nicht länger im Dienste einer Nation, einer Idee stehen, soll nicht Grenzen ziehen, sondern diese in Frage stellen und so auch einem neuen, von globalen Vernetzungen geprägtem Lebensgefühl Ausdruck verleihen. Exemplarisch analysiert die vorliegende Arbeit Texte von Esmahan Aykol, Aslı Erdoğan, Hakan Günday und Elif Şafak und stellt diese in den Kontext sowohl gesellschaftspolitischer Entwicklungen in der Türkei, als auch in Bezug zu Konzepten und Theorien um Prozesse der Kosmopolitisierung.

Nine essays explore the ways in which individual Arabic and Persian authors between the 9th and 17th centuries (with examples drawn from the Abbasid to the Safavid dynasties) chose rulers and other political leaders as the recipients for their writings, instrumentalizing or recreating literary traditions in order to forge and establish the status of an authority for themselves, to fulfill their own requirements and aspirations, and finally to meet the demands of their addressees.

This volume assembles the papers read at a symposium on the diverse forms of literature reception and intertextuality in Middle Eastern literatures in general and Arabic literature in particular. Arabic Studies are continuously confronted with powerful traditions and notions of canon. Yet, questions of intertextuality have only rarely been systematically pursued and a comprehensive study of the various modes of literary reception is equally absent. One key intention of the volume is to alert attention to these desiderata.

This study explores the early prose work of the Syrian-Kurdish novelist and poet Salim Barakat (b. 1951). Containing elements of both the realistic and fantastic, his narrative texts center on the life and culture of the Kurds in the 1950s and 1960s, the growing pressure exerted by Arab nationalism on the Kurdish minority in Syria, and how the Kurds have responded to the political reality. Drawing on methods of modern literary studies and following a dialogical structure, Burgi Roos analyzes the construction of Kurdish identity and the deconstruction of Kurdish nationalism.

Towards the end of the 20th century a new interest in the Ottoman and Seljuk past crystallized in Turkish fiction. In the process, not only an array of aspects connected with the “official”, heroic-nationalist version of history were subjected to a critical revision, but new narrative and fictional forms of historical representation developed. Sehnsucht nach Sinn (Longing for Meaning) examines this literary-inspired new definition of history in dialogue with more recent theoretical approaches to genre, which respond to innovative developments, departing from the traditional model of the “historical novel”, in the area of literary history representation.

One of the major aims of this book is to characterize the Arabic minimalist story as a newly established genre of narrative fiction that exploits a host of “austere” techniques in order to present a variety of socio-political issues. Believing in “less is more”, Arab minimalist writers hope to generate an extreme effect by relating and saying several things with a minimum of words. The unique powerful effect of inspiring its readers to fight and resist that is attributed to the Arabic minimalist story stems paradoxically from its concentrated, focal, sudden, and immediate presentation.

Es gibt kein eigenständiges arabisches Theater. Dieses Genre wurde von den Arabern aus Europa übernommen. Lange Zeit war diese These in Europa und in der arabischen Welt vorherrschend, und teilweise ist sie das auch noch heute. Was aber ist Theater genau? Bedeutet dieser Begriff in allen Kulturen und zu allen Zeiten dasselbe? Diesen Fragen geht die Autorin nach und legt dabei Kriterien an, die in aktuellen Kulturwissenschaften entwickelt wurden. Sie zeigt, welchen Stellenwert der Geschichtenerzähler oder rituelle Spiele im modernen arabischen Theater haben. In diesen Experimenten, in denen traditionelle Elemente mit aktuellen Inhalten verbunden werden, zeigen sich auffällige Parallelen zum Theater in Europa, Afrika, China oder Lateinamerika. An zahlreichen Beispielen wird hier belegt, dass das arabische Theater in einem Prozess transkultureller Interaktionen entstanden und aus dieser Dynamik heraus zu verstehen ist.

This study examines the dramas of the Egyptian writer Ali Salem (b. 1936). In addition to determining Salem’s position in literary history and outlining developments in modern Arab theatre, the contemporary dramatist’s plays written in Egyptian dialect are given detailed consideration. Specifically, the satirical style of these texts is analyzed, enabling the socio-critical potential of these stage works to be identified and gauged.

Thanks to his cycle of poems On the carpet of the wind, the Lebanese writer Fawzī al-Ma ͑lūf (1899−1930) is considered one of the most outstanding representatives of Arabic romantic poetry in Latin American exile. This study undertakes a dual approach of topographical and typological analysis to his multifaceted work, which comprises spiritualistic and political as well as love poetry. Finally, comparisons with European romantic and contemporary Arabic poetry present al-Ma ͑lūf’s work in a broader historical context.