At first glance the length of The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions may seem daunting to even the most enthusiastic of readers. But this is not just a casual overview of the subject, suitable for whiling away a lazy afternoon. It offers a timely look at major developments during the past several decades concerning scholarship produced about the Arabic novel. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the fortunes of the novel genre in modern Arab society and culture and how it got to the place of primacy it holds today, this book will be a resource to return to again and again. It will repay those who have the opportunity to read, re-read, compare and reflect on its major essays for decades to come. The editor of the volume, Professor Hassan, is to be commended for keeping it focused on the major trends, as he sees them, in the study of modern Arabic fiction, while at the same time giving his contributors maximum leeway to produce meaningful interpretations of their subject matter.

Hassan establishes how inclusive and exclusionary impulses have interacted in the study of Arab novelistic traditions very clearly in the introduction to the Handbook. He speaks of “the novel” as having “played an important role in consolidating national identities,” à la Benedict Anderson's imagined communities (6), but he also shows how it frequently became the vehicle for expressing heterogeneous strands within “[e]thnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and other minorities” (9) that challenged the national clichés of homogenization. Parts II (“Developments” in 21 Arabic-speaking countries, from Algeria to Mauritania to Yemen) and III (“Diasporas” in 13 additional countries, from Argentina to the Netherlands to the United States) provide major evidence for the contributors’ contention that Arab novelistic traditions cannot be reduced to single, univocal phenomenon.

Hassan's major focus in the introduction may be on nomenclature and the organization of the entire volume, but he also argues that the “standard account” of the development of the novel in Arabic places it as “a sign of temporal rupture between tradition and modernity” (3) when in reality the story is much more complex. The novel is not, in the view of Professor Hassan and his contributors, simply an imported Western invention (34). The Western novel itself is a hybrid genre with suggestive antecedents in the Andalusian form of the Arabic narrative known as the maqāmāt,Footnote ¹ which culminated in an unprecedented concern for self-reflexivity in early novels like Don Quixote.Footnote ² This hybridity is reinforced by the novel's incorporation of the protean narrative impulse that flowers in folktales and medieval prose narrativeFootnote ³ and, even more clearly, in the sophisticated story-cycles found in the Thousand and One Nights. These concerns about universality and particularity become the crux of the seven thematic essays that form the section “Continuities” in the first part of the Handbook.

Hassan's own “Toward a Theory of the Arabic Novel” sets the tone of the following essays. He begins his 23-page survey of the theoretical landscape by arguing that in recent decades the novel has usurped poetry as the preeminent genre in Arabic literature, at least in part because it provides a ready vehicle for “opposition to oppression, injustice, and prejudice” (20), a characteristic it shares with earlier prose genres in Arabic like the maqāmāt, as the eminent Egyptian literary critic Jābir ‘Aṣfūr suggested in 1999. Hassan confronts the basically teleological conception of the nahḍa (“renaissance”), showing how it became a convenient receptacle for seeing the novel as an indice of modernity. One can therefore “borrow” the novel genre from the West and say “we [are] protect[ing] our identity by modernizing it” (22) and controlling the threat posed by outsiders by assimilating their culture. Hassan skillfully combines his own insights with an account that synthesizes the dominant trends of Arabic and Western literary criticism of the last fifty years. He unerringly singles out the most influential works from both the Arabic and Western critical tradition of novel study–from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel(1957) to ‘Abd al-Muḥsin Ṭaha Badr's Ta ț awwur al-riwāya al-‘arabiyya (1963)–in his overview. Using this historical sketch as a basis, Hassan concludes with a convincing argument that Franco Moretti's chapters on the novel in Distant Reading (2014) may be the most effective guides for future work on the Arab novelistic tradition.

The second essay by Roger Allen, “The Arabic Novel and History,” elegantly addresses both the question of how best to write literary history (being a constructed narrative à la Hayden White's speculations about the intersectionality of fiction and history writing) and the reception of historical novels as the most popular subgenre of the Arabic novel. Allen argues that one cannot properly reckon with the history and development of the Arab novelistic tradition without paying attention to the influence of Jurjī Zaydān's seminal series of historical novels in the late nineteenth century. In particular, Allen links the thematic popularity of the historical novel with Zaydān's “development of a less complex style of prose writing” (54), an observation that links the historical novel to the development of significant innovations in journalistic prose, which had a transformative effect on the Arabic language. But Allen does not pigeonhole the historical novel within the early decades of Arabic novelistic production, and thus fall into the teleological trap of so much conventional literary history, but instead emphasizes the resurgence of interest in the historical novel at the end of the twentieth century by masters of the form such as the Egyptians Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī and Raḍwā ‘Āshūr and the Moroccan Binsālim Himmīsh. The breadth of Allen's survey of the genre and the value of his critical insights should be no surprise, since he himself has been one of the earliest and most influential chroniclers of the Arabic novel since the 1982 publication of his seminal work The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction.

The next essay, Muhsin Musawi's “The Medieval Turn in Modern Arabic Narrative,” strikes a different tone. In particular, Allen's and Musawi's essays can be read with profit as complementary surveys of the origins of the novel—Allen with his valorization of the khabar (anecdote) (51) and the ḥadīth as influential early forms of narrative in Arabic literature, and Musawi with his emphasis on the dream vision and the mystical Sufi narrative (71–74) as animating frameworks for modern Arabic fiction. Musawi carefully draws the links between these medieval generic types and specific modern novels. He further draws an analogy between the medieval historical genre called the khiṭaṭ (plans, layouts, or city maps), whose emphasis on spatiality echoes the privileging of place over time that Fredric Jameson posits as a defining characteristic of post-modern fiction.Footnote ⁴ As Musawi points out, modern novelists inspired by the khiṭaṭ “bring a new turn in [Arabic] narrative, from the bourgeois to the postcolonial epic of struggle against the erosion of landmarks, identity and sovereignty” (78).

The next two essays, “The Novel and the Maqāma” and “A Thousand and One Nights and the Novel,” by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila and Richard van Leeuwen respectively, are both more focused and more modest in their claims than the preceding works. Hämeen-Antilla provides a thorough overview of the history of the maqāma in medieval Arabic literature, as a genre popular in courtly circles presented in the format of “a short, often comic tale written in rhymed prose” (89). Although he gives ample space to the revival of the maqāma in the nineteenth century by important literary figures like Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq and Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī and traces the popularity of those works, in the end he concludes that “the influence of the classical genre [of the maqāma on the modern novel] should not be exaggerated” (99). Van Leeuwen provides a similarly exemplary overview of the textual history of the Thousand and One Nights. He asserts that, initially, the Nights was more influential (through Antoine Galland's French translation) “as a literary model” for the European novel than it was on traditional, canonical Arabic prose (104). Van Leeuwen finds that it was only after the beginning of the twentieth century (106), when the novel was firmly established in Arabic-speaking countries, that the Nights became important as an influence on Arabic novels. Thus it was not a precursor, or inspiration, for the original novels in the Arabic tradition, but was joined with them thematically in a later period.

Hämeen-Antilla argues that, rather than viewing the maqāma as the germinal seed of the Arabic novel, one should look to “the active translation movement, especially in Egypt, [that] brought many European novelists to the attention of contemporary Arab authors, [and] provided an important impetus for the change of literary paradigms, introduced a variety of new genres to Arab audiences” (99). Samah Selim builds on this observation in her essay, “Translations and Adaptations from the European Novel, 1835-1925,” which follows after Hämeen-Antilla's. Selim opens up numerous avenues for inquiry into the hybrid origins of the modern Arabic novel (in a memorable turn of phrase she calls “the novel's journey into Arabic… largely clandestine, meandering, and mischievous” (120)). Not only does she provide voluminous information on the translations themselves, but she also clarifies the vital role played by the press as a background influence on translation practices. Selim also discusses the process of ta‘rīb (Arabization, adaptation), which has encompassed a variety of attitudes toward the text being adapted, “from the fairly faithful to the happily promiscuous” (123). In this regard, she gives welcome attention to the translation of popular subgenres, such as the historical romance and Gothic horror novel, but above all detective fiction and its dramatization of what David Harvey has called “the mystification of the public sphere” (125). Selim's exploration of this thematic of secrecy in modern Arabic fiction is a thought-provoking intervention in the study of Arab novelistic traditions.

Marilyn Booth's “Women and the Emergence of the Arabic Novel,” which concludes the “Continuities” section, synthesizes recent research on the role of women in the early development of the Arabic novel. As Booth notes early in her examination of the topic, women's roles in fostering the success of the novel extends well beyond their contributions as authors, “it is about readerships, girls’ education, venues, sensitivities, and gender difference in public discourse” (136). As in the case of translations, novels with themes that were of interest to women were highlighted in the press, particularly as magazines directed to a female audience became more prominent. Booth emphasizes the importance of the moral didacticism that emerged from this environment. In her view, the efforts of authors, translators, and publishers created an atmosphere where “they sought to create a critical female readership for reform-oriented fiction, and they represented fiction as essential to their reform-oriented goals—as both respectable and activist” (140). This implies that the female audience not only contributed to naturalizing the novel as the preferred site for expressing opposition to social ills, but also that women increasingly were not seen as innately inferior to men. Storytelling became a central strategy for imparting knowledge to women no less than men. Booth highlights the pivotal role of this didactic turn in her examination, at the end of the chapter, of work by several women authors of the period: ‘Ā’isha Taymur (Egypt), Alīs al-Bustānī (Lebanon), Zaynab Fawwāz (Lebanon), Labība Hāshim (Lebanon), and ‘Afīfa Karam (United States) are standouts.

As the seven chapters of the “Continuities” section demonstrate, the act of balancing the various elements that must go into a history book is never easy and it is to Professor Hassan's credit that so much is included in the Handbook. In this respect, the attention paid to geographical coverage, though it takes up the lion's share of space in the volume, is especially welcome. There are serious, historical surveys in the second half of the book that not only attend to to the usual “major” novelistic centers of production like Egypt (Roger Allen, Marie Thérèse Abdelmessih), Iraq (Haytham Bahoora), Lebanon (Elise Salem), Morocco (Gonzalo Fernández Parilla) and Palestine (Ibrahim Taha), but also provide substantive examinations of regions and countries (including in the diaspora) that have traditionally received less attention. Articles by Xavier Luffin on the Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa, Muneera al-Ghadeer on Saudi Arabia, Walid Hamarneh on Jordan, Michelle Hartman on Canada, Waïl Hassan on Brazil and Nijmeh Hajjar on Australia are particular standouts among the group.

There are, however, also themes that are only touched upon in the Handbook tangentially, if at all. It may not have been possible—given that the book in its present form is over 750 pages long—to include everything that might seem relevant, but the reader should not expect to find extensive consideration of issues like influence of Qur'anic narrative conventions or pronouncements on the Arabic novel (though this would undoubtedly have been instructive in the scriptural world of Islamic culture), the rise of popular novelistic subgenres such as science fiction, comics, the detective novel, or horror, the relationship between the novel and other forms of modern narrative like memoirs or biographies, as well as any layered exploration of questions of levels of language and narrative style, even though the novel has had a long and fraught relationship with the issue of whether to use the literary language (fușḥā) or colloquial in dialogue and / or narrative, and it is difficult to reach an accurate assessment of the literary place of the novel in Arabic without some familiarity with this issue.

Aside from these minor quibbles, the Handbook should be recognized as a major scholarly achievement. Each essay, apart from the value of the author's observations and analysis, is equipped with footnotes that sensibly extend the reach of the author's arguments without becoming mired in mere citation for citation's sake. Similarly, each essay boasts, in its works cited at the end, a useful list for students and researchers to further explore each subject. While it may not be the best book as a classroom text, it will be a long time coming before the value of each entry as a research resource is superseded.