Code-Switching in Transnational Anglophone Arab Fiction

Offers a new method for evaluating the guises and functions of visible and invisible code-switching in 21st-century literary works

• Interweaves findings from psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neurology, narrative medicine, child psychology, multiculturalism, identity politics, translation, memory, trauma, and food studies
• Features works by Rabih Alameddine, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, Rawi Hage, Nathalie Abi-Ezzi, Rayyan al-Shawaf, and Michael Mohammed Ahmad
• Contributes to future language-based takes on texts from any art of the world, and written in any language, with a view to code-switching as a narrative strategy
• Promotes stronger collaboration among scholars of literary linguistics, translingual studies, transnational literatures, and translation theories

Responding to calls for renewed investigations into narrative multilingualism, Syrine Hout explores code-switching in contemporary Anglophone Arab literature as a multifaceted phenomenon that can conceal as much as it reveals to monolingual readers. Through analyses of six diasporic novels published across three continents, this book argues that creative writing itself can offer more nuanced and accurate understandings of code-switching, advocating a qualitative rather than quantitative approach to mapping the additional semantic dimensions of multilingualism in transnational Anglophone fiction.