The Hidden Beauty of Nature. Reviving the ClassicalTrope of the Garden as Locus Amoenus in the Egyptian Novel Tarānīm fī ẓill Tamāra

Invoking the beauty of nature can become, in literary language, a catalyst for environmental sensitivity. In the novel Little Songs in the Shade of Tamaara by Muḥammad ʿAfīfī, a domestic garden provides the framework for a discourse on nature. Our article focuses on the way the author treats, in a contemporary novel, the classic motif of the garden—central in the Koran and premodern Arabic literature—to stimulate reflection on the non-human and decenter the human ego.