Crime Fiction In And Around The Eastern Mediterranean

By exploring the transcultural nature of Mediterranean crime fiction, Barbara Pezzotti advocates for a regional 'reading' of the genre.

The first systematic account of crime fiction as a global genre, offering unprecedented coverage of distinct traditions across the world.

This book is a critical study of the translation and adaptation of popular fiction into Arabic at the turn of the twentieth century. It examines the ways in which the Egyptian nahda discourse with its emphasis on identity, authenticity and renaissance suppressed various forms of cultural and literary creation emerging from the encounter with European genres as well as indigenous popular literary forms and languages. The book explores the multiple and fluid translation practices of this period as a form of ‘unauthorized’ translation that was not invested in upholding nationalist binaries of originality and imitation. Instead, translators experimented with radical and complex forms of adaptation that turned these binaries upside down. Through a series of close readings of novels published in the periodical The People’s Entertainments, the book explores the nineteenth century literary, intellectual, juridical and economic histories that are constituted through translation, and outlines a comparative method of reading that pays particular attention to the circulation of genre across national borders.

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of civilizations of the ancient Near East in the imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the 1950s. It explores the ways in which Near Eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of new regulation, new modes of knowledge, and international and local politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity visible, palpable and accessible as never before. The new uses of antiquity and its relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war world order, imperial collaboration and collisions, and national aspirations. Empires of Antiquities uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of a new "regime of archaeology" under the oversight of the League of Nations and its web of institutions, a history of British passions for Near Eastern antiquity, on-the-ground colonial mechanisms and nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the mandate system, particularly mandates classified A, in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in a new culture of antiquity. Drawing on an unusually wide range of archives in several countries, as well as on visual and material evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and local histories of institutions, people, ideas and objects and offers an entirely new interpretation of the history of archaeological discovery and its connections to empires and modernity.

Drawing on a multitude of sources online and offline, in A Bibliography of Islamic Criminal Law Olaf Köndgen offers the most extensive bibliography on Islamic criminal law ever compiled.

The study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.