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Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

Online ISBN:
9780823277216
Print ISBN:
9780823276028
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

Elizabeth M. Holt
Elizabeth M. Holt
Bard College
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Published online:
18 January 2018
Published in print:
11 July 2017
Online ISBN:
9780823277216
Print ISBN:
9780823276028
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

The ups and downs of silk, cotton and stocks synchopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press; time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn, Jurjī Zaydān and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk, increasingly legible as tools of French and British empire unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo and beyond. As silk dominated Beirut’s markets and the hopes of its reading public, Cairo speculated in cotton shares, real estate and the stock market, which crashed in 1907. Hoping against fear, at the turn of the century, serialized Arabic fiction negotiated a struggle with its historical moment of finance. While scholars of Arabic prose in this period often write of a Nahḍah, a sense of Renaissance, Fictitious Capital argues instead that we read the trope of Nahḍah as Walter Benjamin might have, as “one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins.” Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Novel Migration charts the migration from Beirut to Cairo of Fāris Nimr and Ṣarrūf, their journal Al-Muqtaṭaf, and their student Jurjī Zaydān, who would soon publish Al-Hilāl. Leaving behind Salīm al-Bustānī and Beirut’s Al-Jinān years, al-Bustānī’s fiction would continue to profoundly shape the novels Ṣarrūf and Zaydān would go on to write.

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