The last few years of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of Anglophone and Francophone novels by Lebanese-born, and in many cases first-time, authors whose childhood and adolescence were fully or partially spent in wartorn Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Hani Hammoud and Alexandre Najjar top the growing list of post-1995 literature produced in and about exile, thus dealing not only with the civil strife but with one of its most crucial and long-lasting by-products: expatriation. The post-war novels characterise a new literary and cultural phenomenon, and have founded what one may predict to become a full-fledged branch of Lebanese exilic (mahjar) literature.

Elise Salem Manganaro opines that ‘it is necessary to examine the everbroadening definition of what constitutes a Lebanese literature’ and argues for a ‘literary pluralism’, as many authors with no Lebanese identification papers have nonetheless ‘consciously sought to identify themselves with some aspect of this amorphous Lebanon’ (1994: 374–5). A new group of mahjar writers, she states, emerged during the war between 1975 and 1991 in the US, Canada, Western Europe and Latin America. In addition to the geographical distance enjoyed by immigrant authors, the post-war exilic narratives are written with the hindsight necessary to create a critical distance from the immediacy of violence and chaos. Emerging a few years after peace had been achieved in Lebanon, these texts exhibit a more recent consciousness, one replete with irony, parody and scathing critiques of self and nation.