Negotiating Boundaries in Arabic Literatures

The essays of this dossier address the multiple manifestations of the theme of boundaries through a close reading of texts composed in different areas of the Arab world, from the Abbasid period to the present. The analyzed texts range from adab collections to genres of religious literature from the Ottoman period, the epistolary novel of the first half of the twentieth century, to contemporary poetry, short stories, and novels. The articles are oriented by a series of questions that interrogate how different literary genres provide representations of boundaries and of ways to experience and transgress them; the themes, characters, styles, and languages through which Arabic prose and poetry over the centuries have articulated boundaries; how literature constructs and deconstructs the mutual relationship between boundaries and identity and how boundaries have been literarily performed in order to affect the construction of socially recognized or marginalized groups and forms of belonging