Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel

by Elizabeth M. Holt

Overview

The ups and downs of silk, cotton, and stocks syncopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press: Time itself was changing. Khalil al-Khuri, Salim al-Bustani, Yusuf al-Shalfun, Jurji Zaydan and Ya'qub Sarruf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk—increasingly legible at a moment when French and British empires were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo and beyond. As silk dominated Beirut's markets and the hopes of its reading public, Cairo speculated in cotton shares, real estate and the stock market, which crashed in 1907. At the turn of the twentieth century, serialized Arabic fiction and finance at once tell the other's story.

Financial speculation engendered a habit of looking to the future with hope and fear, an anxious disposition formally expressed in the mingling of financial news and serialized novels in such Arabic journals as Al-Jinan, Al-Muqtataf, and Al-Hilal. Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Attuned to the economic and cultural anxiety animating this archive, Fictitious Capital recasts the historiography of the Nahdah and its oft-celebrated sense of rise and renaissance. Reading Nahdah as Walter Benjamin might have, as "one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins," Fictitious Capital shows instead how this utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823276035
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	196
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth M. Holt is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One
In the Garden:

Chapter Two
Like a Butterfly Stirring within a Chrysalis:

Chapter Three
Fictions of Capital in 1870s and 1880s Beirut

Chapter Four
Mourning the Nahah:

Chapter Five
Of Literary Supplements, Second Editions, and the Lottery:

Chapter Six
It Was Cotton Money Now:

Coda

Editorial Reviews

Compelling, inventive, and brilliantly argued, Elizabeth Holt's Fictitious Capital immediately becomes required reading. Linking literary history to financial speculation, modes of consumption, the development of the press in Arabic, the emergence of the book as a modern form, and the changing forms of language and writing in this period, this book has implications for virtually all of the fields within Arabic studies, and beyond, as it changes the ways in which we think about language, reading, modernity, and economy.

Jeffrey Sacks

In this meticulously researched study, Elizabeth Holt offers a much needed reassessment of the nineteenth century Arabic cultural movement known as 'al-nahḍah' (revival). Her focus on the linkages between fiction publication and commerce underlines the foundational contributions made by Syro-Lebanese intellectuals in the earliest development of modern Arabic fiction that have continued into the twentieth century and beyond.

University of Pennsylvania - Roger Allen

"Compelling, inventive, and brilliantly argued, Elizabeth Holt's Fictitious Capital immediately becomes required reading. Linking literary history to financial speculation, modes of consumption, the development of the press in Arabic, the emergence of the book as a modern form, and the changing forms of language and writing in this period, this book has implications for virtually all of the fields within Arabic studies, and beyond, as it changes the ways in which think about language, reading, modernity, and economy."—Jeffrey Sacks, University of California, Riverside

"In this meticulously researched study, Elizabeth Holt offers a much needed reassessment of the nineteenth century Arabic cultural movement known as 'al-nahdah' (revival). Her focus on the linkages between fiction publication and commerce underlines the foundational contributions made by Syro-Lebanese intellectuals in the earliest development of modern Arabic fiction that have continued into the twentieth century and beyond."—Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania

From the Publisher

Elizabeth Holt takes a gigantic step in the direction of telling a pluralistic story of modern Arabic literature in Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel.

Literature & History

Fictitious Capital... is essential reading across disciplines in Middle East Studies, and especially in studies of the nahdạ.

International Journal of Middle East Studies

The strengths of the Fictitious Capital are its close readings, its extraction of the lexical field of financial and literary keywords from the texts, and the slow philological work that bridges these terms together and to the respective fields... Holt's book grounds these lexical terms in close readings of widely unread narratives of the Nahḍa, and convincingly places them within a growing conceptual apparatus of capital.

Review of Middle East Studies

Fiction, in content and form, is a responsive and generative cultural actor, and scholarship cannot but be enriched by an approach such as this one that steadily and skillfully weaves these multiple threads. As such, Fictitious Capital offers to be both a model and a blueprint for future research in Arabic literary studies and beyond.

Middle Eastern Literatures

This important new work challenges paradigms for the study of the rise of the novel and assumptions about the Nahḍah, pushing forward scholarship in the field of Arabic literature.

Journal of Arabic Literature