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. Novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk begin to appear in Arabic at a moment when France and Britain were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo, and beyond. Amid booms and crashes, serialized Arabic fiction and finance at once tell the other's story. While scholars of Arabic often write of a Nahdah, a sense of renaissance, Fictitious Capital argues instead that we read the trope of Nahdah as Walter Benjamin might have, as ""one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that [are] already in ruins."" Financial speculation engendered an anxious mixture of hope and fear formally expressed in the mingling of financial news and serialized novels in such Arabic journals as Al-Jinan, Al-Muqtataf, and Al-Hilal. Holt recasts the historiography of the Nahdah, showing its sense of rise and renaissance to be a utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital that encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.

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9780823276035

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Reviews

Compelling, inventive, and brilliantly argued, Elizabeth Holt's <em>Fictitious Capital</em> 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

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

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-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

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 * 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 *

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 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

Author Information

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

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