Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel

Kifah Hanna is Assistant Professor in the Department of Language and Culture Studies at Trinity College, USA.

• Introduction: Gender, Nation, and War: A New Critical Conjunction1. The Vicious Cycle: Contemporary Literary Feminisms in the Mashriq2. The Gendered Subject: Literary Existentialism in Gh?dah al-Samm?n's "Beirut Tetralogy"3. Sahar Khal?feh's Resistance Literature: Towards a Palestinian Critical Realism4. Gender Dialectics: Hud? Barak?t's Aesthetics of AndrogynyAfterword: Women Writing War, A Levantine Outlook

"Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel is a bold and timely intervention in the field of Arab feminist studies, and constitutes an important addition to scholarship on Levantine writers due to its focus on questions of aesthetics, attention to masculinity and sexualities, and openness to a wide range of intercultural critical frameworks, including psychoanalysis and the 'avant-garde.'" - Anna Ball, Senior Lecturer in English, Nottingham Trent University, UK "Hanna makes important advances in the field of Middle Eastern literary studies by identifying the emergence of a new literary feminism centered on aesthetics rather than simple thematic or chronological typologies. This timely work helps to deepen our cultural understanding of an important but troubled region by raising new literary critical perspectives related to gender, politics and war." - Elisabeth Kendall, Senior Research Fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Oxford, UK, and author of Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde: Intersection in Egypt