This chapter applies an intersectional analysis to reconstruct the harshness of laborers’ daily lives in British Guiana, examining the dimensions of race, labor categories, age, and gender. Working women particularly felt the pangs of the economic downturn as they were pushed out of the plantation economy during this turbulent decade. The reader is transported into the challenging hydraulic environment of 1930s British Guiana to understand what it meant to be alive and work on plantations in that colony and in that period. I specifically discuss the aftermath of the great flood of 1934 that took place during the Great Depression and how that disaster exposed the failures of British modernity and unleashed a crisis-based solidarity.

In the early 1840s, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-3) relocated fictional mystery from a medieval-gothic imaginary to a modern urban landscape, and sparked a widespread international craze for stories involving the secrets, iniquities, and inequities of the modern city. I trace the evolution of mystery as a designation for fiction and argue that considering the modern mystery widely, starting with its penny press origins, reveals an extraordinarily diverse and socially radical genre. Expanding and historicizing the genre in this way reveals the limits of the dominant critical view of mystery as an inherently conservative genre. Rather than functioning as a tool of social discipline, the modern mystery teaches readers to distrust immediate perceptions and to scrutinize assumptions. I introduce the terms visual fetishism, kaleidoscopic vision, and kaleidoscopic reading to help describe how the modern mystery engages readers in plots that depend on misleading clues, the thrill of visual instability, and the unexpected pleasures of spectatorial discomfort, and argue that the mystery’s paradoxical attitudes towards visual powers and problems cultivate a form of empathetic vision that works to challenge the very social hierarchies the genre has often been understood to uphold.

The global turn in Modernist Studies has emphasized the connection between literary modernism’s unique aesthetic practices and the politics of a given modernity. In the Turkish experience of modernity, the question of how to differentiate the identity of the new nation from its predecessor the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of debates about the role of literature and aesthetics. Even though the empire had formally ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, legacies of imperialism fundamentally shaped debates over how literature of the new nation should be written. In this chapter, Kaitlin Staudt suggests that the relationship between modernist literary aesthetics and the literary representation of imperialism in the early Turkish Republic was rooted in global imperial power relations.

The introduction covers the state of modernist studies within Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures today, with reference to broader scholarship on global, transnational, and planetary modernism. It explains the logic behind the seven sections of the book: Adab, Poetry, Prose, Politics, Aesthetics, Easterlies (about connections to Urdu, Russian, and Central Asia), and Comparison. Most extant studies of modernism and modernity in the field focus on singular national contexts in the Middle East in relation to Europe and the Orientalist hangover that the region continues to suffer. Contributors to this volume instead consider instances of modernist connections in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that exist beyond Western influence and can be traced back through local channels to Arab Islamic turāth (cultural heritage) rather than to literary and artistic encounters with the West. To flesh out the theoretical underpinnings of the volume, the editor discusses major novels and films in relation to time, modernity, modernization, and modernism to begin defining the parameters of the investigations to follow.

This chapter takes up Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā’s first published novel, Ṣurākh fī layl ṭawīl (Cry in a Long Night, 1955), arguing that it integrates modernist elements and themes into Arabic prose. Jabrā’s prose experiments derived from a literary-intellectual posture that he fully articulated in his 1958 essay al-Ḥurriyyah wa-l-ṭūfān (Freedom and the Flood). This posture, which Jabrā framed through the term al-qalaq (anxiety), was the basis of his adamant rejection of iltizām (political/social commitment) in literature. Jabrā’s experiences as a student in the UK and Harvard, his embrace of literary formalism modeled after New Criticism, and his investment in the project of cultural renewal (tajdīd) in Arabic art and literature, guided his approach to translating modernist form into Arabic. The chapter argues that Jabrā’s adaptation of the late modernist discourse of aesthetic autonomy into Arabic, which he articulated through the language of individual freedom, was positioned against discourses of commitment in an Arab intellectual tradition that viewed the relationship of aesthetics to politics as irrevocably tied to the questions of class and colonialism.

In conversation with recent scholarship which has revised the relevance of the Islamicate adab culture for Middle Eastern modernities, this chapter revisits the history of modern literature in the late Ottoman Empire. Conventionally, Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity is placed within the framework of Tanzimat (reorganization) which refers to a process of state-led politico-economic structural reforms across the empire. As in other kindred political–cultural reawakening periods overshadowed by Eurocentric comparative methodology, modern Ottoman/Turkish literature has largely been characterized as a set of anti-Islamicate gestures whereby the shared Perso-Ottoman literary culture was heavily criticized and rejected. In an attempt to counter this narrative, this chapter advances adab, Sufi poetics, and hermeneutics in particular, as the conceptual infrastructure of Ottoman literary modernity. After establishing how modern Ottoman/Turkish literature embodies hermeneutical practices associated with Sufi poetics, the chapter situates Ottoman literary modernity within an ethical–aesthetical tradition and calls for understanding modernity from the perspective of literary ethics.

In this chapter, Shir Alon suggests a framework to account for global modernist aesthetics that forgoes a diffusionist model of “traveling forms,” yet still acknowledges European literature’s inevitably hegemonic and influential position on the sphere of literary production. Looking at debates about modernity and literary form taking place in Hebrew and Arabic letters, she extracts a theoretical framework that traces the emergence of modernist prose forms to the lived experience of modernity, an experience that often fails to align with modernity’s promises. Recognizing modernity as singular, happening everywhere simultaneously but experienced differently and unevenly, the chapter undoes the “Europe first” diffusionist model of modernist aesthetic, while still recognizing the outsized effect of Europe’s hegemonic position as the rest of the world’s designated future. Modernism is not simply the outcome of European literature’s influence, but a project that emerges in numerous sites within the modern world system.

This chapter positions the period known as the Nahḍa, or the Arab renaissance, in the history of Arab modernism. It begins with Edwār al-Kharrāṭ’s 1999 study of Arab modernism, Aṣwāt al-ḥadātha. Focusing on the introduction to the book, the chapter assesses al-Kharrāṭ’s distinction between modernism (ḥadātha), which is always already deferred to the future and impossible, and “the modern sensibility, al-ḥasāsiyya al-jadīda,” which is open to historicization, investigation, and periodization. Dallal’s chapter approaches the Nahḍa through al-Kharrāṭ’s lens and traces the modern sensibilities of adab in the nineteenth century and their intimate connection to a growing discourse of civilization (tamaddun). This discourse rooted adab in its expansive traditional meaning while also opening it up to the new genres of social existence and their institutions that were appearing in the nineteenth century. Using Muḥammad al-Muwaylīḥī as an example, Dallal studies two formal characteristics that define the modern sensibilities of nineteenth-century adab: temporality and the binary hierarchies of the manifest and the latent.

This address calls for a return to the original mission of religion: to serve humanity. It emphasizes that all religions stem from one divine truth and were revealed to guide people toward justice, peace and unity. Religion’s decline into conflict occurs when it is co-opted for self-interest and power. True religion defends the vulnerable and opposes tyranny, aligning itself with the poor and oppressed.

The text urges unity among faiths to overcome division and serve human dignity. It criticizes modern civilization for sidelining faith and exploiting human energy through consumerism, inequality and the idolization of wealth. Religion, it argues, must restore balance, cultivate human potential and oppose injustice, lies and pride, which drain societal energy.

Human freedom, faith and moderation are essential for social harmony. The human being is central: the engine of history, bearer of divine qualities and the true wealth of Lebanon. Society must nurture every person’s potential, without marginalization or exclusion.

Sadr advocates for inclusive development, justice and unity in Lebanon, framing the country’s diversity and human capital as sacred trusts. Only through sincere commitment to human dignity and shared responsibility can Lebanon fulfill its moral, spiritual and national purpose.

The Romantic Self is constituted by otherness, by relations that are in constant transformation. In the preceding pages, this issue has been addressed with a particular focus on the relationship between the self and nature. In this part of the book, we shall see that the same applies to the relationship between the self and history: the I cannot separate herself from, or impose herself on, the historical conditions in which she emerges; rather, these are part of the Romantic Self. In this chapter, in particular, I will show that the ‘defective’ essence of the Romantic Self hinders her to impose her sovereign will on the development of historical events. This is reflected in her incapacity to bring into unity the fragmentation of the modern age (described by Friedrich Schlegel through an opposition to the ancient epoch) and in the impossibility to interpret history as a manifestation of human progress. The absence of a unitary line in history challenges the hermeneutics of the present, too: on this, Schlegel’s genealogical perspective wants to give a solution.

This introduction presents a historical and conceptual overview of the monograph, particularly the longer history of discourses connecting Italian opera, Italy and italianità, and ideas surrounding the Old World and the New World. Milan and Liberal Italy (1861/70–1922) are introduced first in the context of Italy’s unification and the wider social and technological transformations that defined the Second Industrial Revolution. New York and Buenos Aires are then considered together, exploring their changing position in the global operatic circuit from the 1870s onwards and the theatrical infrastructure in both cities, before the methodological approach of the monograph and an overview of the individual chapters are outlined.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’ lifelong preoccupation with time as a philosophical and compositional problem, tracing its evolution from early influences such as Oswald Spengler to the yagé-induced revelations of “space-time travel” and the radical temporality of the cut-up method. Tomasz Stompor argues that Burroughs’ literary experiments – from epistolary montage to newspaper-formatted layouts – challenge the linear, regulated time of modernity and propose alternative, nonlinear temporal regimes. Drawing on the Composite City vision from The Yage Letters, Spenglerian cyclical history, and Burroughs’ self-constructed calendar inspired by Mayan systems, the chapter demonstrates how Burroughs’ formal innovations enact temporal disruption. Through analysis of his cut-up trilogy, contributions to little magazines like My Own Mag, and the spatial logic of montage, Stompor positions Burroughs as a literary time-traveler whose work seeks to liberate the reader from linguistic and chronological control.

In Ngugi wa Thiong’os works, Agĩkũyũ cultural history is almost always perceived through its tensions and contestations with the British colonial enterprise. This is unsurprising because Ngugi is a product of these two cultures. In his early works, it is the powerful image of the mother that calls our attention to Ngugi’s rootedness in the Gĩkũyũ cultural foundation. Still, it is his mother, Wanjiku – herself a victim of dislocation that came with the chaos and violence of colonial occupation – who becomes the conduit to Ngugi’s new identity as a Western-educated colonial subject. Wanjiku is to Ngugi what Nyokabi, in Weep Not, Child, is to Njoroge: an adjuvant of assurance and hope during moments of crisis. One of these crises is a demand by modernity for Ngugi to shun the past in which his mother and all she represents reside. The past, however, resists complete erasure because its marginalisation enables the rise of a new and modern order. In wrestling with this crisis, Ngugi’s life of writing has been characterised by an unceasing search for a form that can create new cultural mythos. In this chapter, I argue that Ngugi’s unending search is now manifested in his new translation project.

This chapter continues the discussion of how English came to function as the language of African self-expression in the twentieth century and was ultimately liberated from its colonial legacies. The chapter starts by exploring the so-called language question, a long-running debate on the status and function of the English language in the making of African letters, which has perhaps been the most divisive issue among African writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The debate was not simply a feud on language use but the expression of a deep anxiety about what it has meant to produce a literature of decolonization in the language of the former colonizer. The second part of the chapter provides an account of the evolution and transformation of English in Africa among different social groups including the slave traders of Calabar, Creole elites in West Africa, and the elites produced by the colonial schools and university colleges that produced the first generation of African writers.