Overview

There are more than 15 million people aged over 65 currently living in the MENA region, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural significance of growing old. This book recognises the widespread silence by countering the critical corpus that reads modern Arabic novels as a political discourse with an emphasis on youth achievement. By assembling a range of fictional works from different parts of the Arab world that incorporate older characters, this book draws on a range of theoretical approaches to aging, particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism, to reconcile the biological and cultural understandings of old age. It reveals that there is no standard female or male experience and no single prototype of oldness in the modern Arabic novel, and that men and women manifest a multiplicity of identities, concerns, and experiences as they grow older.

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9781474466752

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Reviews

"Breaks the interminable silence on aging through a nuanced analysis of an eclectic range of novels from different parts of the Arab world that incorporate older characters who challenge the transience of elderly identity by acknowledging aging ""as a process that integrates organic and socially inscribed processes.""--Yasmine Khayyat, Rutgers University ""Journal of Arabic Literature 53 (2022)"" Samira Aghacy has written an interesting book that fills a gap in criticism of contemporary Arabic literature. At a time when ageing has become a major socio-economic issue, Arab male and female writers are addressing the proliferating roles of the elderly and how attitudes to them are changing. This book analyses sixteen Arabic novels from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and Tunisia to demonstrate that there is no single model of old age either in society or in literature. In so doing, it contributes to an appreciation of the ways in which fiction opens up new vistas on occluded subjects.-- ""miriam cooke, Duke University"" The book's forte, I believe, lies in its attempt and success to counter ageism in literary studies, and move elderly men and women from the margins of literary representation to the centre of critical attention. In this sense, Samira Aghacy's Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel offers an original piece of serious research, providing a research model, and inviting an extension of this scholarship across generic boundaries, and into a wider spectrum of the MENA region, in literary studies and beyond.--Hala Kamal, Cairo University ""Cairo Studies in English, Volume 2022, Issue 1"""

Author Information

Samira Aghacy is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and interim Director of the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at the Lebanese American University. She is author of Masculine Identity in the Fiction of Arab East since 1967 (2009), and has published numerous articles on contemporary Arabic fiction. She also served for seven years (1997-2003) as editor of Al-Raida, a feminist peer-reviewed journal published by IWSAW.

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