A wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between history and literature

This issue of Alif explores the relationship between literature and history. What do history and literature have to say to each other? What can literature say that history cannot, and vice versa? Do they work with or against each other? How does the literary dimension of history affect its status, and how does the historicity of literature, in turn, shape its being? What would it mean to speak of a “literariness of history” today? The terms “literature” and “history” in our title are intended to be construed in the broadest possible sense and to cover the widest possible range of genres and modalities of literary and historical writing. The recent proliferation of epithets and sub-disciplines in the study of both literature and history has fundamentally changed both fields while raising further questions about the possibility of scholarly debates that traverse them.

Contributors

- Balthazar I. Beckett, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Mohamed Birairi, Beni-Suef University, Beni-Suef, Egypt, and the American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Ziad Dallal, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA
- Karim Elsaiad, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
- Itzea Goikolea-Amiano, SOAS, University of London, London, UK
- Rebecca Ruth Gould, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
- Magdi Guirguis, Kafrelsheikh University, Kafr al-Sheikh, Egypt
- Isabelle Hesse, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
- Abdullah Ibrahim, literary critic
- Madonna Kalousian, independent scholar
- Céza Kassem, independent scholar
- Ahmed F. Khaleel, University of York, York, UK
- Tarif Khalidi, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
- Peter Kornicki, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
- Wen-chi Li, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- Azza Madian, Cairo Conservatoire and American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
- Francesca Orsini, SOAS, University of London, London, UK
- Daniel Rivet, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
- Anne C. Vila, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA