Series Information:
Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History and Culture

This collection of essays concentrates on Arab-American writer and artist Etel Adnan. Up until now, there has been no single volume dedicated to her work despite Adnan's increasing recognition and acclaim across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays fall into two sections. In the first, the essays respond to the range of vision and experience in Adnan's writing and art through analysis and appreciation. The second section focuses on responses to and interpretations of Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan's well known novel about the Lebanese war. As a whole, the writings in this work seek to provide a comprehensive look at Adnan's literary and artistic accomplishments through analysis and close readings that place her texts within wider literary contexts.

"Geographies of Light" is a voice of the Palestinian people, bearing witness to brutal loss, as well as the joy.

A true "intersection," of Arab women's texts that challenges and rewrites the traditional boundaries of nation, gender, and community.

This rigorously documented collection brings together for the first time original essays by leading authorities in the field on nine contemporary Arab women novelists from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. The work focuses on texts available in English translation and explores with great theoretical sophistication the relationship of these authors' texts to contemporary phenomena of feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, war, transnationalism, and societal changes.

The writers included here are descendants of multiple cultural heritages and reflect the perspectives of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Syrian. They are from diverse socioeconomic classes and spiritual sensibilities: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and atheist, among others. Yet they coexist in this volume as simply American voices. Atefat-Peckham gathered poetry and prose from sixteen accomplished writers whose works concern a variety of themes: from the familial cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts in the works of Iranian American writers Nahid Rachlin and Roger Sedarat to the mysticism of Khaled Mattawa's poems; from the superstitions that govern characters in Diana Abu-Jaber's prose to the devastating homesickness in Pauline Kaldas's characters. Filled with emotion and keen observations, this collection showcases these writers' vital contributions to contemporary American literature.