The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel

After the Lebanese Civil War, many Lebanese novelists committed themselves to building a "memory for the future." What resulted was a vital contribution to the legacy of contemporary Arabic literature. Through interviews, literary analysis, and the lens of trauma studies, Lang sheds light on what it means to remember through post-war literature.

"This book is a well researched and serious study of two decades of Lebanese novelistic production in English, French, and Arabic. Lang's frank discussion of the forces at play in the Lebanese literary field brings out the grain of generational literary production in Lebanon. His deft analyses of the civil war theme acknowledges but goes beyond trauma theory and 'the memory industry.' His book will appeal to literary critics, anthropologists, and humanists interested in the cultural life of the Levant as well as those interested in next-generation trauma studies." - Ken Seigneurie, Professor of World Literature, Simon Fraser University, Canada

"Felix Lang brings together several theoretical tools, mainly -but not only- Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of the literary field as a locus of struggle for symbolical power. We discover with this book how the notions of memory and trauma are being used and remodeled by these writers, and we feel compelled to read, re-read, or teach the great novels of the likes of Elias Khoury, Rachid El Daïf, Hoda Barakat or Rawi Hage from new perspectives." - Richard Jacquemond, Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Literature, Aix-Marseille Université, France

Autorentext

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

Inhalt
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