Female Voices and Egyptian Independence

"This book offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Egyptian and British novels represent the Egyptian nationalist project in its struggle against British hegemony in the aftermath of two revolutions: the 1881-82 Urabi Revolution, known for inaugurating the British occupation of Egypt, and the 1919 Revolution celebrated in Egyptian national memory as the classic Egyptian revolution par excellence. Reading the novels against the grain, the study recovers female voices that are multiply marginalized, due to their gender and/or ethnicity, whether by colonial imperial powers, the nation, their immediate regional community or, finally, by the works under discussion themselves. Using a comparative lens, the study foregrounds the ways in which the authors confirm, critique, rewrite/revise, or reject developmental narratives. Paying particular attention to women that range from the uneducated black slave (a topic seldom discussed in Arabic literary studies), to the uneducated rural Siwan woman with artistic talent (Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis, 2009), to the wealthy cultured Coptic housewife (Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell), to the rising late nineteenth-century British female professional (The Guns of El Kebir by Jon Wilcox), and finally to the eclipsed twentieth-century Egyptian female national intellectual (Naguib Mahfouz's Sugar Street, 1992), all of whom play crucial roles in the journeys of the respective male protagonists, and by extension, the Egyptian national project"--

1. Introduction
2. Egypt the Grotesque: Breaking Leila's Shackle in Lawrence Durrell's Mountolive
3. Lessons in Modernity: Naguib Mahfouz's Sugar Street and the Female National Intellectual
4. Alice in Wonderland: Egypt and the Benevolent Empire in The Guns of El Kebir
5. The Women of Mahmoud's Dreams: Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis and the National Mosaic
6. Conclusion