Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

Interrogating the early history of the Arabic novel, this chapter challenges Eurocentric and nationalist narratives that have long defined the genre through the lens of European realism and national authenticity. It critiques the exclusion of nineteenth-century Arabic works – many of which were serialized, translated, or formally hybrid – from the canon, despite their self-identification as novels. Focusing on Khalil al-Khouri’s Wayy, Idhan Lastu bi-Ifranji (1859), the chapter explores how early Arabic novels emerged through practices of translation, adaptation, and circulation, often blending Indigenous narrative forms with European influences. Rather than viewing these texts as imperfect imitations, the chapter argues for understanding the Arabic novel as a genre formed in and through translation. It ultimately offers a broader, more inclusive literary historiography that accounts for the novel’s translingual, transregional, and intertextual development within the context of the Nahda.

This chapter analyzes the classification of “Gulf literature,” arguing that this geographical categorization inaccurately limits the diverse cultural and global contexts found in novels by authors from the Gulf countries. It posits that such a demarcation fragments Arabic literature and often perpetuates Orientalist clichés. Using Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s Ibn Arabi‟s Small Death as a case study, the chapter points to the ways in which the novel transcends regional boundaries through its engagement with Sufism and universal philosophical questions, displacing a narrow Saudi Arabian identity. It challenges the tendency to reduce Gulf literature to sociocultural or nationalist critiques, advocating for a comparative reading approach that recognizes its sophisticated artistic and intellectual contributions and its ability to destabilize conventional literary classifications.

This chapter reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a circular bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Mosteghanemi’s novel imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts a transregional geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together. A self-conscious heir to the transregionalism described in this study, Mosteghanemi retains its Arab scale to great commercial success but gently critiques its collective, male Arab voice. Through the voice of her male narrator, Arab literary constructions of meaning over Algeria are revealed as homosocial exchanges between male intellectuals, bonding them across distance and rivalries. In Memory, literature’s interpretation of Algeria emerges as an autobiographical task, revealing and narrating an Arab intellectual subject to himself and his likenesses.

This chapter reads the Moroccan novelist and theorist Mohammed Berrada’s literary-critical memoir Mithla ṣayf lan yatakarrar (Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated, 1999). A former Souffles contributor, Berrada laments an Arabic in Summer that is recognizable as the emotionally potent, transregional Arabic that propelled the Moroccan avant-garde. Berrada’s memoir, which moves between Egypt and Morocco, ties this Arabic to the Egyptian president and charismatic Arab nationalist leader Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser’s 1956 Suez speech as the unrepeatable origin of anti-colonial, Arab revolution. In Summer, Arabic was once transregionally alive, but it is lost in the present. Summer makes the narrative of this loss – at once linguistic, political, historical, and emotional – the necessary task of the Arabic novel at the end of the twentieth century. Revisiting themes of gender and corrupted language, Summer expresses nostalgia for Nasser as a benevolent, Arab nationalist strongman and for the emotional experience of decolonization. In its theory of the Arabic novel after Arab nationalism, Berrada’s memoir imagines itself relaying the solitary voice of an author (who also reads transregional Arabic novels about the end of revolution) to his distant, equally isolated Arab reading publics.

Chapter 9 explores what the transregional system excluded. Algerian novelist al-Tahir Wattar’s novel al-Lāz (The Ace, 1974) was rejected by Mashreq publishers in the 1970s for its purported denigration of the Algerian War of Independence. Refusing the elevation of the war to a sacred origin in Algerian state nationalism, Ace also broke transregional literature’s taboos. In this corpus, Algeria’s revolution is a quasi-mythic zone of noble deeds, honorable men, and utile language. Transregionalism evacuates moral and political ambiguity to secure the war as the ground from which it can narrate the emotional unities of Arab collectives. Ace’s deconstruction of the war as national, founding myth had a domestic target: to unmask what historian Benjamin Stora called the Algerian state’s “faceless” revolution and repopulate the war’s memory with living, disagreeing Algerians. Yet this account of the war also rendered Ace disruptive to transregional circuits and unlikely, in the eyes of publishers, to find a reading market. Wattar’s undisputed prominence in Algerian literature thus contrasts with his marginality in the corpus of transregional Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies. Transgressing the conventions transregional literature erected around Algeria, Ace figures an interpretive sensibility to come, merging thought and emotion to explore new imaginaries of emancipation.

This chapter traces an aesthetic shift in realism in Arabic literature through a materialist framework that engages two core concepts: historical context (including social and political changes) and literary form. It explores how the relationship between poetics and politics shapes the transformation of realism in the Arabic novel during very significant moments in Arab history, including the political radicalism of the 1950s, the military defeats in the 1967 war, and the Arab Spring in 2011, showing how realism still responds powerfully to the historical change that the region has been undergoing since 2011. It explores how the realist mode aesthetically captures the stateless Bidun residents of Kuwait in Nasir Al-zafiri’s Al-Sahd (Scorched Heat, 2014) to offer a counter-narrative. Furthermore, it examines the realist representation of state violence, structural marginalization, and the alienation of the constantly changing city of Amman in Jalal Barjas’s Dafatir Alwarraq (The Bookseller’s Notebooks, 2020), emphasizing the contemporary persistence and deepening of realism in Arabic literature.

Lebanese and Syrian immigrant women living in the Americas, or the mahjar, published some of the earliest Arabic novels and women’s journals as part of the nahḍa, or the Arabic literary and cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cultural hub of this Arabic literary movement in America was New York City’s first Arab immigrant neighborhood, “Little Syria,” located just blocks from what is now known as “Ground Zero.” A consideration of works by diasporic Arab women writers North and South America both 1) reframes the Arab nahḍa as a transnational movement, and 2) expands the definition of what can be considered “American literature.” By shedding light on this neglected archive – and re-inserting Arab women into the wider American historical and literary narratives from which they have long been erased – this essay demonstrates that “Arabs” are in fact an important, yet neglected, part of American history.