In this volume Wen-chin Ouyang, discussing the theme of the politics of nostalgia in the Arabic novel, analyses some typical phenomena of the post-modern period based on “a new understanding of the past” (p. 225). In fact she goes on to inquire about the discourse of the Arabic novel on modernization, and focuses particularly on the subjects of nostalgia and madness. She examines the ways in which this literary genre looks at the present through the lens of the past, nostalgically reviving the tradition and rewriting it in a dialectic discourse. In the light of the strong contrasts suffered by the Arab literary world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until today, she underlines some paradoxical aspects of the “new” attitude, showing how easily the past tradition can become a burden for the present, when nation building and modernization come face to face with insurmountable political realities. However, she also admits that heritage can be the first step towards linking tradition with modernity and towards building a new postcolonial national identity (p. 225).

Ouyang divides her volume into three parts, and each part into two chapters. In part 1 she brings to light the features of literary politics still turning towards the past. To rewrite tradition with new ways using newly revisited traditional genres, to engage positively with the past, to keep nostalgia as a force in creating a new present and a new future: all those actions seem to be positive powers for the formative evolution of the modern Arabic novel. Finally, in this first part of the volume, Ouyang underlines both the importance of nostalgia as a motive power in the labyrinth of intertextuality and the role of the active action of “archaeology” in the Arabic novel (p. 68).

In the second part the author faces the complex theme of madness and alienation due to the difficulty in finding a common identity and a definite national ideology: in Arabic literature the ruins of dream and memory seem to be buried under a world of crazy words and of questions without answers, where a widespread deep anxiety about life shows a close affinity between stories and history. In this way, she observes, the madness of the surrounding world seems to be reflected in the madness of the language of literary texts. Among the various writers and the many texts Wen-chin Ouyang uses to integrate her work, there are Ḏākira li ‘l-nisyān by Maḥmūd Darwīsh and Maǧnūn al-ḥukm by Bensalem Himmich: the first to demonstrate how illusory a love passion could be, the second to offer evidence for how desire could often resemble madness, how madness could often be a tyranny and how often tyranny is bound to the wish of liberation, in a triangle of signs which is sometimes impassable. The author writes: “Madness (ǧunūn) and reason (ʿaql) make an odd couple in Arabic epistemology. They are not necessarily diametrically opposed on Arabic poetics of love … Madness and sanity are two sides of the same coin when tyranny is omnipresent” (p. 125).

The third part of the volume is devoted to the analysis of the triad formed by time, history and story, used in modern Arabic novels in order to write a new national literature. Wen-chin Ouyang shows how some traditional literary genres, such as biography, autobiography or the musāmarāt, are intensively used by modern writers in a modern way (pp. 147–57). Among the texts she cites and analyses, she writes at length about the novel Awlād ḥāratinā by Naguib Mahfouz, underlining that in this novel the allegory of the history of the whole of humanity represents also the story of Egypt searching for the right government system and a better distribution of wealth. In this third part of the volume the author speaks about a kind of “nationalization of history” (p. 165).

In the epilogue (pp. 224–7) the author confronts the problem of the renewal of the modern Arabic novel in its various forms and underlines that “the dominance of the nation-state as the structuring episteme and chronotope is problematical politically and aesthetically for various groups of writers” (p. 225). However, in this epilogue she appears less pessimistic than in the previous volume, Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel. Once again she uses a passage by Loventhal to introduce her thoughts: “All at once heritage is everywhere … One can barely move without bumping into a heritage site”. We can suppose that she agrees with him when he says, answering the question about the reasons why heritage is so crucial in a world beset by poverty and hunger, enmity and strife: “We seek comfort in past bequests partly to allay these griefs” (p. 224). Wen-chin Ouyang concludes her volume by expressing her personal ideas about the modern Arabic novel, underlining that “the story the ‘Arabic novel that employs tradition’ tells is only one part of the history of this genre in Arabic” (p. 226).

The rich bibliography offered by the volume, above all in Arabic, offers to scholars a precious cue for research on the fascinating themes analysed by the author. Her choice of the various writers quoted in her study is based on her personal sensibility, her personal aesthetic tastes, her personal sympathy and, not least, her specific interest in their ideas in the light of her analysis.

Despite the complexity and richness of the subjects treated by Wen-chin Ouyang in these two volumes, and despite the undeniable difficulty in rationalizing a phenomenon as rich and composite as the evolution of the modern Arabic novel, Ouyang's work is serious and interesting, and offers a valuable contribution to the study of modern Arabic literature, in a new and variegated key.