Introduction

While the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies may be a relatively recent phenomenon, an explicit concern with the space of the city has had an enduring presence in the Arabic-Islamic tradition. The trope of the madīna (town or city, plural: mudun), whether real or imaginary, ideal or corrupt, conquered or lost, earthly or celestial, is a recurrent motif throughout the premodern Arabic literary corpus. In the modern period as well, while critics have often chosen to focus on early Arab novelists’ interest in the rural, the canonical texts of post-World War II/post-colonial Arabic poetry and prose reveal that the city has, time and again, served as a virtual battleground for some of the Arab world's most complex intellectual, sociocultural, and political issues. In this sense, the city is transformed into something beyond a physical structure and textual space, taking on the role instead of an auto/biographical, novelistic, and poetic arena – frequently troubled and contested – for debating the conflict between the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern, the individual and the communal, and the Self and the Other.

From its initial conception, the aim of this volume has been to address the topic of the city in the Arabic literary tradition as a whole, its goal to explore the ways in which the city has been represented by both classical and modern authors writing in Arabic from different theosophical and ideological backgrounds. Crucial to its organizing theoretical paradigm from the beginning has been the rejection of the stark rupture that is too often seen to separate the premodern and modern Arabic literary traditions. We set out determined to view the entirety of the tradition as an evolving continuum and to create a collection relevant to scholars of both classical and modern Arabic literature. While our original vision for the volume saw it as consisting of eight chapters chronologically within the premodern period and eight chapters chronologically within the modern, it turned out that many of the contributors to this collection declined to strictly differentiate between the premodern and modern of their own accord.