Search Results

This introductory chapter discusses briefly the history of the study of Egyptian literature, highlighting how broader developments in the theory of literature have come to be applied within Egyptology, and outlining the significant interpretative issues that still remain. This is particularly acute when studying a civilisation such as Ancient Egypt, with an only fragmentarily preserved literate culture, and no continuous tradition of reception to condition modern engagement with the ancient texts. The chapter reviews the approaches taken by contributors to the volume, and evaluates how they relate to recent developments in the application of theoretically informed approaches to Egyptian texts. The range of topics covered demonstrates the vitality and diversity of current Egyptological engagement with Ancient Egyptian texts.

This chapter discusses aspects of Egyptian ‘fine literature’ (belles-lettres), and combines general literary and cultural-scientific theoretical considerations with specific case studies from both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian literature. It addresses questions of form and function, producers and recipients, as well as discussing the search for empirical readers. Also discussed are the question of original manuscripts and the potential significance of writing errors.

This chapter discusses the genre and style of Ancient Egyptian literature. Through the application of lexicostatistics, it analyses a total of fifty texts. Having examined the vocabulary size of Middle Egyptian narratives, Late Egyptian narratives, speeches, and dialogues, the texts under investigation are grouped into genres such as ‘religious texts’, ‘artful prose’, ‘poetry’, ‘teachings’, and so on. On the basis of texts existing in several copies, it becomes apparent that a text maintains a constant vocabulary richness independent of its length. Each copy therefore facilitates the determination of the genre of a text. Furthermore, the language of a text (Middle or Late Egyptian) proves not to be decisive for the vocabulary richness of a text, but rather it is genre that is indicative. The chapter also investigates the question of the practical function of texts, which can best be detected during experimental reading.

This chapter analyzes the work of Ali Salem (1936–2015) and Taha Husayn (1889–1973). Husayn, the doyen of modern Arabic literature, and Salem, a leading Arabic-language playwright, are considered two of the main avatars of Pharaonism; the former dominating the early decades of the twentieth century, the latter commanding influence in the early twenty-first. In The Future of Culture in Egypt (1938), Husayn made the case for an Egyptian Egypt and an Egyptian identity separate and distinct from the worlds of Islam and Arab nationalism. Salem's 2004 satire, The Odd Man and the Sea, presents a spacious notion of the Mediterranean as a sea of culture—fluid, inclusive, pantheist by its very nature, and of which Egypt is a vital current.

This chapter discusses pilgrimage and the ziyāra in the Islamic context. It looks at the culture of devotion, of which pilgrimage and saint veneration were an integral part. For many, participating in the veneration of saints was a form of remembering God, the dead, the Hereafter, and one's religious duties. The discussion explores the nature of Syrian, Egyptian, and Shi'i pilgrimage guides and literature, as well as the lives of devotees, the rituals they performed, and the value with which they invested the ziyāra. Jews and Muslims performed the rite annually during holy days when the shrine was most likely to produce miracles. However, for some Muslim and Jewish theologians, the performance of ziyāra rituals at saints' tombs was contentious and regarded as idolatry and heretical innovation.

This chapter provides the historical context in which Egyptian blogs appeared. Drawing on ethnographic research on the Internet and in the Egyptian literary sphere, it shows that the introduction of Internet tools in the Arab world was soon accompanied by the emergence of numerous platforms for distributing and discussing Arabic literature, such as forums, literary websites, online publishing houses, the Internet Arab Writers Union, and so on. This atmosphere was conducive to the adoption of blogs as a platform for literary experimentation in Egypt. The chapter then focuses on blogging in the Arab world and in particular in Egypt, providing a short history of its development. It also addresses how Internet media have affected Arabic literature as a tool for publishing and distribution, as in the case of book-blogs.

Whereas the hara represented the well-ordered urban fabric of the old city, the imara has come to embody the contradictions of the global face of the mega-metropolis. This chapter looks at four Egyptian contemporary novels that offer complementary representations of the imara as an emerging urban metaphor. A close reading of these texts helps one to trace many of the changes in Cairo's urban fabric during the second half of the twentieth century. By examining four Egyptian novels of the 1990s—Sonallah Ibrahim's Dhat, Hamdi Abu Golayyel's Lusus mutaqa'idun (Thieves in Retirement), Alaa Al–Aswany's Imarat Ya'qubyan (Yacoubian Building) and Mohamed Tawfik's Tifl shaq ismuhu Antar (A Naughty Boy Called Antar)—the discussion maps out some of the new spatial and social forms of polarization within the mega-city.

This chapter discusses pulp stories in the repertoire of Egyptian folk singers. In the hands of a master, pulp stories may incorporate characteristic folk themes. The chapter examines the tazhīr or the ‘opening of the flower’, which sets apart pulp stories from other forms of performances. These pulp stories have rhymes that are inflated into multiple and usually polysyllabic paronomasias achieved by extensive distortion of the normal pronunciation of words. This involves omitting, adding, or altering vowels, semi-consonants, glottal stops, retaining only the consonants in their correct order, so that the result may be called a ‘consonantal’ pun. In addition, pulp stories do not twang the deepest nerves in the consciousness of the common folk.