Literary Empathy in the Modern Middle East

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

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.