The Other Middle East: An Anthology of Modern Levantine Literature
Franck Salameh
Abstract
This book is an original collection of Middle Eastern literature (Levantine literature). It offers a glimpse into a contemporary Middle East that defies common Western misconceptions and prejudices. Compiled over the course of more than two decades, the featured prose and poetry in translation reveals an extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures, and a surprising range of sentiments and ideas, that provide Western readers with a powerful new understanding of the rich mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. The book explores the lives, thought, and works of ... More
This book is an original collection of Middle Eastern literature (Levantine literature). It offers a glimpse into a contemporary Middle East that defies common Western misconceptions and prejudices. Compiled over the course of more than two decades, the featured prose and poetry in translation reveals an extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures, and a surprising range of sentiments and ideas, that provide Western readers with a powerful new understanding of the rich mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. The book explores the lives, thought, and works of some twelve Levantine literati, while assessing the possibility of valorizing a greater degree of pluralism in Middle Eastern public life, even as the modern Middle East as we have come to know it through the twentieth century seems to have “collapsed” in the aftermath of the 2010 events formerly known as the “Arab Spring.”
Keywords:
Middle Eastern literature,
ethnicity,
religion,
Levantine literature,
contemporary Middle East
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300204445 |
Published to Yale Scholarship Online: May 2018 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300204445.001.0001 |