Literary Empathy in the Modern Middle East

Reconfigures literary empathy in Arabic and Hebrew literature through the lens of global capitalism

• Constructs a comparative framework for Middle Eastern literature across Arabic and Hebrew
• Analyses literary works by Ghassan Kanafani, Ala Hlehel, Ibtisam Azem, David Grossman, Itamar Levy, Assaf Gavron, Bothayna Al-Essa, Abdulrahman Munif and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
• Brings together literary criticism, affect theory, political economy and world-systems theory
• Engages with Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Shafeeq Ghabra, Adam Hanieh, Fredric Jameson, Suzanne Keen, Georg Lukács, Karl Marx, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and Raymond Williams

Empathy towards “other others” – whether racial, ethnolinguistic or socioeconomic, has long occupied an important place in literature of urbanisation, colonialism and capitalist expansion. However, scholarship on this phenomenon has largely been limited to cultural production in European languages of the global core. This book is the first study to consider empathy in the context of Middle Eastern literature, offering a comparative analysis of novels and short stories in Arabic and Hebrew from Palestine, Israel and the Arab Gulf. Following flows of emotion and capital across borders and languages, it explores how parallel literary phenomena in seemingly unrelated traditions nevertheless serve to illuminate interrelated paths of integration into global capitalism. With its Marxian, world-systems approach to affect, this work offers a new framework for understanding both literary empathy and the Modern Middle East.