O Livro das Mil e Uma Noites, na forma como se encontra em seu grupo de manuscritos mais antigo, o chamado ramo sírio, configura-se como um grande compêndio de narrativas árabes de cunho erótico, em sua maioria. As cenas encontradas nessas narrativas, quase sempre explícitas, revelam mulheres sensualíssimas, donas de corpos desejados, e homens desejosos desses corpos e, na maioria das vezes, traídos por suas mulheres. Porém, uma narrativa em especial se destaca fortemente nesse universo carnal das Noites: a história de \"Nūruddīn ͨ Alī Bin Bakkār e Šamsunnahār\". O amor que tem lugar nessa narrativa beira o divino e inefável, e suas descrições, sempre imprecisas, revelam a dificuldade em se descrever um amor tão distante da carne e de seus desejos. Mas não é só no livro em questão que tal narrativa se destaca: dentro de toda a tradição amorosa da época a que pertence (entre os séculos IX e XI, no apogeu do Califado Abássida), tal como a conhecemos hoje, essa história de amor se mostra como única. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo analisar justamente esse destaque da narrativa de \"Nūruddīn ͨ Alī Bin Bakkār e Šamsunnahār\" dentro de seus contextos: primeiramente dentro do Livro das Mil e Uma Noites e, posteriormente, dentro da literatura amorosa abássida. Busca-se comparar a narrativa dos dois amantes com todas as outras narrativas erótico-amorosas das Mil e Uma Noites, demonstrando suas diferenças substanciais. Além disso, busca-se mapear a tradição literária amorosa abássida, demonstrando como Nūruddīn e Šamsunnahār nada têm que ver com os amantes das narrativas de amor da época. Ao final do trabalho, enumerando-se e analisando-se pormenorizadamente essas características de destaque, aproximamos a narrativa dos dois amantes a outras obras, contemporâneas a ela, que se declaram platonizantes. Assim, situamos a história de Nūruddīn e Šamsunnahār num pequeno e pouco estudado grupo de obras árabes medievais: o grupo que compartilha características que se assemelham às das obras platônicas e neoplatônicas. / The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, in the way it is written in its oldest group of manuscripts, the Syrian branch, is composed as a big compendium of erotic Arabic stories, in its majority. The scenes found in those stories, which are almost always explicit, reveal very sensual women, owners of desired bodies, and men who desire those bodies, and who are, almost always, betrayed by those women. However, one story in special contrasts from the others in this carnal universe of the Nights: the story of \"Nūruddīn ͨ Alī Bin Bakkār and Šamsunnahār\". The love described in this narrative approaches the divine and ineffable love, and its descriptions, always imprecise, reveal the difficulty of describing a love, which is so distant from the body and its desires. But, the narrative of the two lovers is not a highlight only in this book: in the whole erotic tradition to which it belongs (the Abbasid love, between the IX and X centuries), this story shows itself as a unique one. The present dissertation aims to analyse these highlights of the narrative of \"Nūruddīn ͨ Alī Bin Bakkār and Šamsunnahār\" in its contexts: first, inside the Book of the Thousand and One Nights and, after that, inside the erotic Abbasid literature. We do it by comparing the story of the two lovers to all the other erotic narratives of the Nights, demonstrating all the substantial differences among them. Besides that, we draw a map of the whole erotic Abbasid literary tradition, demonstrating how Nūruddīn and Šamsunnahār have nothing in common with the other Abbasid lovers, described in the erotic stories of that time. At the end of the dissertation, by enumerating and analysing carefully those characteristics of highlight, we approach the narrative of the two lovers to other works, contemporary to it, which declare themselves to be platonic. By doing that, we situate the story of Nūruddīn and Šamsunnahār in a very small and not studied group of Arabic medieval works: the group, which shares similar characteristics with the platonic and neoplatonic works.

This thesis involved the various discourses around Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's representation of women in four of his most well-known novels, which were originally written in Arabic. At the one extreme, he is described as a feminist writer who takes up an aggressive anti-patriarchal stance, delivering a multi-faceted critique on Egyptian society. Mahfouz's personal milieu, as well as the broader social context in which he finds himself, was given careful consideration. It was also considered whether the genre in which the four novels have been written has a significant influence on the manner in which Mahfouz has represented his female characters.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis involved the various discourses around Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's representation of women in four of his most well-known novels, which were originally written in Arabic. At the one extreme, he is described as a feminist writer who takes up an aggressive anti-patriarchal stance, delivering a multi-faceted critique on Egyptian society. Mahfouz's personal milieu, as well as the broader social context in which he finds himself, was given careful consideration. It was also considered whether the genre in which the four novels have been written has a significant influence on the manner in which Mahfouz has represented his female characters.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-232).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Kiel, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-351) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Dystopian fiction as intended in the Western literary tradition is a 20 th century phenomenon on the Arabic literary scene. This relatively new genre has been experiencing an uplift since the beginning of the 21 st century and many works that have been defined dystopias have been published and translated into English in the last 10 – 15 years. In order to find out their main features, Claeys’s categorization of literary dystopias is applied and a thematic analysis is carried out on four Arabic dystopian works of narrative, written by authors from different parts of the Arabic world. The analysis shows that 21 st century Arabic dystopias are political dystopias, with totalitarianism as their main variation. Rather than on society, their focus is on the individual, and more specifically on personal freedom. The totalitarian constraints are mainly caused by religious fundamentalism and bureaucratic procedures. Surveillance and control over population are implemented by means of religious precepts and bureaucratic constructions, together with, in some instances, control over language and technological devices. Political totalitarianism regardless of a specific political ideology is identified as main theme. The thesis suggests that a Western-based classification framework is only partially suitable for Arabic dystopian fiction of the 21 st century and that further research, including but not limited to a specific classification theory for Arabic dystopian fiction, is necessary to properly investigate this new literary trend in Arabic literature.

This thesis offers the first detailed study of publishing culture in the medieval eastern Islamic world by examining how two influential anthologists active in Central Asia mediated between authors and their audiences. It analyses the contents of al-Tha'ālibī's (d. 429/1037-8) Yatīmat al-dahr, a biographical anthology of Arabic poetry and prose concerned with the literature of the 4th/10th and the early 5th/11th centuries, comparing them with the material found in 'Awfī's (d. 640/1242 or before) Lubāb al-albāb, a biographical anthology of Persian poetry focused on verse produced between the late 3rd/9th and the early 7th/13th centuries. Yatīmat al-dahr and Lubāb al-albāb are approached as ventures which aimed to render the high culture of Arabic and Persian literature accessible to readers by presenting hitherto unpublished texts in a pedagogical fashion. The thesis contributes to a current wave of research that is concerned with the history of the book in the Islamic world, but it moves the focus of such scholarship onto literary texts and their manipulation. Its principal findings can be summarised as follows: Firstly, it revises the prevalent idea that literary culture was entirely dependent on patronage, by demonstrating how market demand influenced the kinds of writing produced in the different regions of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Patronage emerges as a force that was intertwined with the book trade, which had already begun to define conceptions of authorship. Secondly, it shows that anthologies are more than collections of exemplary texts, by uncovering how al-Tha'ālibī and 'Awfī pursue the study of society, literary history and literary theory. The anthologists did not simply reproduce extracts, but edited them in accordance with their broader intellectual projects. Lastly, it reconstructs the cosmopolitan literary culture which existed in Khurasan and Transoxiana between the 4th/10th and 7th/13th centuries, showing that many authors worked in bilingual Arabic-Persian environments, moved between Arabic and Persian spheres, and read books in both languages. The thesis is accompanied by an index of circa eight thousand poems catalogued by genre, and by an appendix which lists the material that the anthologists drew from their sources.

This doctoral thesis explores the contexts of utopian writing and thinking in the Nahda, the Arab 'Awakening' of the long nineteenth century. Utopian forms of social imagination were responses to fundamental changes in the societies of the Arab-Ottoman world brought about by integration into a capitalist world economy and a European-dominated political system. Much Nahda writing was permeated by a sense of a 'New Age' opening and of wide horizons for future change - and this was not simply illusory, but a direct response to actual and massive changes being wrought in the writers' social world. My study focusses on Egypt and Bilad al-Sham in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from the early 1830s to the mid-1870s. An initial chapter offers a definition of the social classes and groups which contributed to the Nahda in these years - such as the Beiruti bourgeoisie and the Egyptian-Ottoman official class - drawing on the work of Arab Marxists such as Mahdi 'Amil and social historians such as Bruce Masters. The following chapters deal in detail with writings produced by three distinct cultural formations within the Nahda movement, and with different aspects of their social imagination. Chapter 2 examines the discourse of civilisation (tamaddun) through the work of the Beiruti writers Khalil al-Khuri and Butrus al-Bustani in the 1850s and 1860s. Chapter 3 deals with Nahda writers' sense of their place within the European-dominated world, mainly through translations of geography books made by Rifa'a al-Tahtawi in Mehmed Ali's Egypt in the 1830s and 1840s. Chapter 4 examines the utopian aspirations of the Nahda, through a close study of the major utopian literary work of the period, Fransis Marrash's Ghabat al-Haqq (The Forest of Justice, 1865). Finally, a conclusion places my study in relation to other recent work in the field of 'Nahda studies'.