The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel Memory, Trauma, and Capital

by Lang, Felix

• ISBN13: 9781137559883
• ISBN10: 1137559888
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-11-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

After the Lebanese Civil War, many of Lebanon's best known novelists committed themselves to building a "memory for the future." More than twenty years later, Elias Khoury's and Rashid al-Daif's postwar novels rank among the most important texts in contemporary Arabic literature, fomenting a new generation of writers authors to begin writing about the civil war. The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital argues that the Lebanese Post-Civil war novel is a response not so much to trauma, but to the forces at work in the literary field. From the book market to literary prizes to the similarity of the writers' biographies and socio-economic backgrounds, a number of factors worked in favor of novels offering a literary war narrative for Lebanon's secular upper-middle class.

Author Biography

Felix Lang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg, Germany.

Table of Contents

Introduction
PART I: THE LEBANESE LITERARY FIELD
1. Newspapers, Prizes and Politics: The Field's Institutions and the Global and Regional Context
2. What Makes a Good Novel in Lebanon? The Values of the Field
PART II: "WE'RE ALL IN THE DARK" - THE FIRST GENERATION OF (POST-) WAR AUTHORS
3. The Civil War Novel and the Break with Tradition
4. Revolutionaries Turned Writers: A Secular Left-Wing Habitus
5. Destruction and Deconstruction: Forms of Literary Remembering
PART III: GHOSTS IN THE ARCHIVE - THE SECOND GENERATION OF POSTWAR AUTHORS
6. The Civil War Novel as Gateway to the Literary Field
7. Humanist Commitment: A New Habitus
8. Archive, Trauma and Reconstruction: New Forms of Literary Remembering
Conclusion: Whose Truth, Whose Power?
Appendix A: List of Authors
Appendix B: List of Novels