Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: The Awakening Story
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Khālid left the [Calcutta students'] club … and saw the horizon opening up before him and realised he was existing in semi-darkness, his own horizon as narrow as a picture frame. There and then he resolved to study literature and philosophy when he got back to Iraq.
Al-Sayyid, Jalāl Khālid (1928: 308)When [the two men in the train leaving London] asked him where he came from, he proudly answered that he had obtained a PhD in agriculture and was on his way back to his country Iraq. The word Iraq was unfamiliar to them … He said: ‘It's Mesopotamia, the country oil comes from.’ They replied as one: ‘Why didn't you say that in the first place?’
Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb, al-Duktūr Ibrāhīm (1939: 8)The early development of fiction in Iraq coincided with the birth of Iraq as a unified country. This first chapter will offer a brief historical sketch of events from the end of Ottoman rule in the three Iraqi provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul (1918) up to the Second World War. We will then move towards a discussion of the early development of Iraqi fiction through a survey of three key fictional texts, with further references to relevant historical events: Sulaymān Fayḍī's al-Riwāya al-īqāziyya (‘The Awakening Story’, 1919); Maḥmūd Aḥmad al-Sayyid's Jalāl Khālid (1928) and Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb's al-Duktūr Ibrāhīm (‘Dr Ibrahim’, 1939).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 1 - 29Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013