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"'A Fabrication in Fabrication': Ya'qub Sarruf's *Fatat Misr* and the Fiction of Finance in Colonial Egypt"
- Author(s):
- Elizabeth M. Holt (see profile)
- Date:
- 2016
- Group(s):
- 2019 MLA Convention
- Subject(s):
- Arabic literature, Imperialism, Finance, Sociology, Capitalism, History
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- cairo, Suez, indian ocean, stock market, Colonialism, Sociology of finance, History of capitalism, Maritime history
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/q6vp-jp11
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT Serialized over the course of 1905 in the Arabic journal al-Muqtaṭaf, Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s novel Fatāt Mişr [The Girl of Egypt] was avidly read by contemporary subscribers and then soon forgotten by Arabic’s reading public. Ṣarrūf came to despise Fatāt Mişr and all of his novels, finding that the market for the genre in Arabic fell far short of generating the kind of profits to which British novelists and press barons had become accustomed. Fatāt Mişr tells a tale of British finance capital in Egyptian cotton fields, and if read in its time as a warning against speculating in stocks, land, and irrigation schemes, at the same time it offers a lesson in doing just that. Through a review of Ṣarrūf’s Fatāt Miṣr and its publication history, this article argues that the speculative disparities that enabled the British to profit over Egypt and so many other former colonies are the shared history in Arabic of the novel and finance alike.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 4 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
holt-sarruf-abhath-2016.pdf