A01=Charis Olszok
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allegory
animal studies
Author_Charis Olszok
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Category=DSBJ
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_biography-true-stories
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fiction
Language_English
Libya
Libyan fiction
Middle Eastern literature
Muammar al-Gaddafi
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781474457460
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2022
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Analysing prominent novelists such as Ibrahim al-Kuni and Hisham Matar, alongside lesser-known and emerging voices, this book introduces the themes and genres of the Libyan novel during the al-Qadhafi era. Exploring latent political protest and environmental lament in the writing of novelists in exile and in the Jamahiriyya, Charis Olszok focuses on the prominence of encounters between humans, animals and the land, the poetics of vulnerability that emerge from them, and the vision of humans as creatures (makhl?q?t) in which they are framed. As Libya transforms into a dictatorial, rentier state, animals represent multi-layered allegories for human suffering, while also becoming focal points for empathy and ethics in their own right. Within reflections on Italian colonisation and ensuing forms of political and social oppression, concomitant with oil, urbanisation, exile and war, staged in remote deserts, isolated coastlines and neglected city parks, The Libyan Novel examines how physical, emotional and intellectual hardship prompts empathetic gazes across species lines. Through engagement with the folkloric and Sufi traditions which define the country's past, and shape its modern fiction, it further traces the spiritually, environmentally and politically holistic imaginings that contest a precarious reality.
Charis Olszok is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Newnham College. Her first monograph, The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability (EUP, 2020), charted the Libyan novel through its vision of human and nonhuman entanglement. Since then, she has published on ecology, oil and the fantastic in Arabic literature. She has also translated several works of Arabic fiction into English.
