Synopses & Reviews
This is the first book to evaluate works by Western and Muslim women writing about the Muslim experience in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States. In addition, Sharif Gemie looks at how women’s writing about Muslim societies has changed over the past century, from the playful and humorous works by pioneering female travelers like Freya Stark and Edith Wharton, to more recent accounts marked by fear, hostility, and even disgust, such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter. Gemie also identifies and examines a new wave of female Muslim writers whose work touches on problems of integration, identity crises, and the changing nature of Muslim cultures.
Review
“Innovative. . . . This book is especially recommended for those interested in women’s studies, Muslim studies, and comparative literature.” B. Harlow, University of Texas at Austin
Synopsis
An analysis of a hundred prominent, commercially successful works by women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, concerning Muslim living in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, the UK and the USA.
About the Author
Sharif Gemie is professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Glamorgan, UK.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Citations
Introduction: A Party with a Hundred Women: on Dialogue, Orientalism and Women’s Writing
1. Travellers’ Tales: a Typology
2. Author and Self
3. The Politics of Time and Space: a Fractured Modernity
4. Voyages in Manistan: the Female Traveller and the Secret Woman
5. Islam: Return Journeys
6. Towards Dialogue?
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index