9781137559883

1137559888

"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 and a new generation of authors has begun writing about the civil war. The role of collective and individual trauma seems to be central to this development. However, as this book will show, 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 and 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"-- Provided by publisher.

"A study of the Lebanese post-civil war novel and the social space in which it developed, this book seeks to go beyond notions of individual and collective trauma in explaining the paramount importance of "war novels" in Lebanese literary production"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction

PART I: THE LEBANESE LITERARY FIELD

1. Newspapers, Prizes and Politics: The Field's Institutions and the Global and Regional Context

2. The Values of the Field: What Makes a Good Novel in Lebanon?

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.

1975 > 1990

Arabic fiction > Lebanon > History and criticism.

Lebanese fiction (French) > History and criticism.

Lebanon > History > Civil War, 1975-1990 > Literature and the war.