Book Review: The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts

FarmÄn on the other hand experiments with literary realism as defined by Auerbach, especially in his novel Nakhla, to negotiate issues of colonial and postcolonial spaces, and the quotidian tensions characters face in the conflict between modernity and tradition. [...]the Iraqi novel's journey consists more of attempts to achieve resolutions to real conundrums and riddles in love, injustice, deceit, alienation and exile. To demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between the text and its multiple contexts and anxieties of influence, and its multiple dislocations, is a welcome pedagogical move that would help students of modern Arabic literature and new scholars appreciate more closely how the dynamic duality of "home" and "exile" or specificity and universality has subtly operated in the case of the Iraqi novel.