Hudā Barakāt’s novels are complex and densely woven texts that focus on the obsessions and inner conflicts of their protagonists. The first monograph dealing with the Lebanese author’s work, this book presents in-depth analyses of her first three novels, each of which addresses one key aspect: androgyny as metaphor, madness between lovesickness and mystical experience, and utopia or ‘real’ counter-worlds. In the context of the ‘spatial turn’, the study analyzes these aspects as transgressions or borderline situations. It starts by developing a concept of ‘Grenzgänge’ (‘moving across/along borders’) that encompasses various physical as well as conceptual spaces, combining ideas from different disciplines: heterotopy, borderline and transgression, threshold and liminality as well as interspaces or ‘Third Spaces’ and ‘ZwischenWeltenSchreiben’ (‘writing-between-worlds’). The concept elaborated here offers an instrument for analyzing literary texts that opens up new perspectives and reveals analogies and differences between various borderline situations.

How do word lists matter for Arabic literature? From the perspective of Literary and Cultural Studies, this monograph approaches the literary word lists of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805/1806–1887), one of the most important Arab intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and discusses them as a fundamental social and cultural critique of his time. In the framework of the ‘return to philology’ (Edward Said), the book discovers in al-Shidyāq’s language thinking an intellectual radicalism and artistic experimentation, which sheds new light on the Nahḍa, the Arab renewal movement on the eve of modernity.

This study of Niẓāmī’s (d. 1209) Makhzan ul-asrār (Treasure of Mysteries) deals with problems of the work’s history and reception, analyzing the formal setting of the poem as well as its stylistic elements, in particular its rich and difficult imagery. This demands a detailed examination of the alternately reflective, homiletic, and narrative textual structure of Makhzan ul-asrār, of Niẓāmī’s virtuoso technique of forming chains of associations, and of the didactic topics. Finally, the study provides a translation with commentary of the twenty parables, included by Niẓāmī in his first Mathnawī.

This volume is the first comprehensive, across-media study of the work of the Lebanese film auteur Ghassan Salhab. His oeuvre emerges in a conceptual environment shaped by a crisis of representation. It is examined not only in its confrontation with the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) but also, and above all, in its aesthetic dimension. In doing so, the predominance of oral, poetic narration in the Arab-Islamic tradition as well as notions of melancholic expression and moods are considered as they emerge in periods of disorder provoked by war and subsequent reorientation.

Die arabische Dichtung über die italienischen Konzentrationslager in Libia Coloniale wird häufig primär als historische Quelle verstanden, ohne dass die Literarizität der Gedichte beleuchtet würde. In Ein leises Geräusch, wie ein Gefühl des Sehnens wird der Versuch einer literaturtheoretischen Annäherung an das Thema unternommen, um die sich in der arabisch-nomadischen Dichtungstradition befindlichen Erzählungen von Trauma und Leid in den Blickpunkt zu rücken und als arabische Lagerliteratur neu zu verstehen.

The book is devoted to the subject of the Arab reception of Franz Kafka between 1939 and today. The study focuses on the examination of Kafka and his work in the form of intellectual reflective commentaries. It deals with the productive reception and presents modern Arabic literary works which were somehow inspired by or close to the writing of Kafka. The central question of reception as a process of cultural translation includes the preoccupation with Kafka’s Jewish affiliation in the context of the Jewish Arab conflict, tracing back the modern Arab history of thought with all its varieties via such indirect ways of reception.