Joseph, Jesus and Job are all immediately recognizable religious figures in both Christianity and Islam who have been incorporated into a range of artistic and literary projects both inside and outside the Arab world. This study examines how three Lebanese women authors borrow and use these religious figures within their works of creative fiction. It proposes that the social, political and literary contributions of these works are interlinked and that their messages, especially those related to religion and gender, emerge through their innovations and artistry as creative works.
Drawing on the dual critical frameworks of intertextuality and postcolonial feminist theory, the study sets these works and their themes in relationship to multiple contexts, posing the question: Are these Arabic, French and/or Francophone novels? Should they be understood as Arab, Lebanese, and/or ‘Third’ World texts? As women’s literature? The works treated are: Hudā Barakāt’s Ḥajar al-ḍaḥik, Najwā Barakāt’s Ḥayāt wa-ālām Ḥamad ibn Sīlāna, and Andrée Chedid’s La femme de Job.
Joseph, Jesus and Job are all immediately recognizable religious figures in both Christianity and Islam who have been incorporated into a range of artistic and literary projects both inside and outside the Arab world. This book examines how three Lebanese women authors borrow and use these religious figures within their works of creative fiction: Huda Barakat re-casts the Qur’anic Yusuf in 1980s Lebanon during the Civil War and rewrites his relationship with Zulaykha in Hajar al-dahik, Jesus appears in the guise of a Lebanese peasant called Hamad in Najwa Barakat’s novel told through four ‘tales’, Hayat wa alam Hamad ibn Silana, and Andrée Chedid reclaims an individual voice, story and life for her work’s title character in La femme de Job. The book argues that through the use of religious figures in secular works, authors draw on the imaginative power that the sacred texts hold in the public imagination in order to strengthen and solidify textual messages.
This study proposes that the social, political and literary contributions of these works are interlinked and that their messages emerge through their innovations and artistry as creative works. Some of the issues engaged in these novels that are discussed in the book include: equality between the sexes, relationships between men and women, challenging fixed and rigid gender identities, questioning confessional and religious loyalties, and working against violence and war.
Joseph, Jesus and Job: Reading Rescriptings of Religious Figures in Lebanese Women’s Fiction uses the dual critical frameworks of intertextuality and post colonial feminist theory in order to develop a reading method through which to understand these texts and together with and in relation to a series of contexts. The question of how to define and categorize literary works and the usefulness of this is explored through a discussion of each works’ multiple contexts - are these Arabic, French, and/or francophone novels? Should they be understood as Arab, Lebanese, and/or Third World texts? As women’s literature? All of the works treated in this study are placed in dialogue with a number of other literary works both within Lebanon and beyond it. The book therefore contributes to discussions and debates both within and outside the field of Near Eastern, and specifically Arab, literary studies.
Diese Reihe stellt innovative Arbeiten zu den nahöstlichen Literaturen in ihren verschiedenen Epochen und Gattungen vor. Sie versteht sich nicht ausschließlich als ein Forum für Orientwissenschaftler, sondern möchte auch Komparatisten, Literaturwissenschaftlern und einer interessierten Öffentlichkeit Einblicke in das breite Spektrum gegenwärtig produzierter und rezipierter Literatur des Nahen Ostens bieten.
Denn die Herausgeberinnen, Autorinnen und Autoren wollen den Titel der Reihe programmatisch verstanden wissen. Sie gehen von einem Begriff der Weltliteratur aus, der die orientalischen Literaturen nicht nur statisch einbegreift, sondern sie in ein Kulturregionen und Nationalsprachen übergreifendes Spannungsfeld stellt, dessen Dynamik erst im interdisziplinären Austausch erfasst werden kann. Sie gehen ferner davon aus, dass Literaturen in vielfacher Weise intertextuell geprägt sind, dass sie Lektüren verschiedenster vorausgehender Texte darstellen und daher erst in ihrem „lokalen historischen Kontext“ ihren Reiz als Ausdruck einer regional geprägten Ästhetik entfalten können. Die Reihe versucht so, einer neuen Sensibilität für mythische, archetypische, aber auch historische Subtexte in der nahöstlichen Literatur Bahn zu brechen, sie aber gleichzeitig als wichtigen Ausdruck einer globalen kulturellen Mobilität sichtbar zu machen.
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