Gibran Khalil Gibran as Arab World Literature

Examines the work and reception of the Arab émigré writer Gibran Khalil Gibran

• Analyses Gibran’s Arabophone and Anglophone writings together and in context, rethinking in the process the relationship between poetics and politics
• Offers situated close readings that demythologise Gibran and demonstrate his creative embeddedness in global modernity and the Arab nahda
• Draws on posthumously published texts that shed new light on Gibran’s oeuvre and its historical and contemporary relevance
• Discusses the problematic of Gibran’s bilingualism with an up-to-date critical and conceptual apparatus
• Studies and questions the reception of the Anglophone Gibran in the American and Arab contexts, providing a rounded picture of Gibran as an incarnation of Arab world literature

This monograph studies the Arab mahjari (émigré) writer Gibran Khalil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran) by examining his oeuvre as bilingual Arabic literature beyond biographical and culturalist approaches. It situates Gibran within his worldly contexts to unveil and analyse how the particular and the universal dialectically intersect in his multifarious work, including poetry, short stories, essays, plays and letters. What emerges is a post-religious poet who is both modern and critical of modernity, a creative but anxious bilingual writer, and a critical-nationalist intellectual embedded in the nahda or Arab renaissance. In its situated close readings of Gibran’s work in both languages and across genres and contexts, the book reveals what is both absent and absented in its Anglo-American reception, demonstrating that there is much more to Gibran than his famous book The Prophet. It also probes this reception alongside its Arabic counterpart, highlighting and interrogating the multiple conditions of reading that have produced different functions of Gibran.