Aldous Huxley writes that ‘nations are to a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists’ (1959: 50). Although by talking about ‘invention’ Huxley may have exaggerated the nature of the link between nation building and literature, this book subscribes to the broad thrust of his statement by examining the role literature plays in constructing, articulating or challenging interpretations of national identities in the Middle East. Thus, most of the chapters in this book are devoted to Arabic literature – here broadly defined as literature in Arabic by Arab writers – owing to the demographic dominance of the Arabs in this part of the world. The remaining chapters delve into Hebrew literature, Arabic literature in translation and Arab literature in its trans-national mode as expressed in a language other than Arabic, in this case English. In terms of genre, the book covers poetry and the novel in their capacity as the prime examples of high culture, as well as oral or ‘folk literature’ in the modern period as an expression of the localisation of the lived socio-political experience of a national group in a ‘here’ and ‘now’ that invokes the heroism of the past. In terms of provenance, a few chapters deal with the literary expression of Palestinian nationalism as the enunciation of a ‘stateless’ or ‘refugee’ nation, while other chapters cover the construction of national identity in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and Israel, thus providing an array of geographies and sociopolitical contexts that can add to our understanding of the interaction between literature and the nation in the Middle East.