Yasmine Ramadan, "Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)

New Books in Middle Eastern Studies

In 1960s Egypt, a group of writers exploded onto the literary scene, transforming the aesthetic landscape. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) explores how this literary generation presents a marked shift in the representation of rural, urban, and exilic space, reflecting a disappointment with the project of the postcolonial nation-state in Egypt. Combining a sociological approach to literature with detailed close readings, Yasmine Ramadan explores the spatial representations that embodied this shift within the Egyptian literary scene and the disappearance of an idealized nation in the Egyptian novel. Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction provides a robust examination of the emergence and establishment of some of the most significant writers in modern Egyptian literature and their influence across six decades while tracing the social, economic, political, and aesthetic changes that marked this period in Egypt's contemporary history.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Yasmine Ramadan about the representations of Cairo, Alexandria, Upper Egypt, Europe, and the Gulf in modern Egyptian fiction.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability studies.

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