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Elizabeth M. Holt, Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). Pp. 196. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780823276035

The rise of the Arabic novel, Elizabeth M. Holt contends in Fictitious Capital, is not a story of nation, but of capital—financial speculation, debt, commodity production— which in the 19th century was on the move, facilitating the integration of global markets as well as the consolidation of European Empire and the eclipsing of the Ottoman one. In focusing on the novel’s transnational flows rather than its exclusively national roots, Fictitious Capital participates in the “transnational turn” in literary studies and joins other analyses of 19th-century novels such as Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998), and Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Yet while more than a few of such authors rely on market metaphors (whereby the world literary field is posited as a unified global market), Elizabeth Holt excavates locally-specific histories of the silk and cotton markets in order to uncover the deep structures of the Arabic novel. Hers is a study of the material made metaphorical, and vice-versa. In six illuminating chapters that focus on novels published between 1870 and 1905, Holt tracks the mutually constitutive relationship between financial practices, print capitalism, and literary form, and describes the modern structures of feeling that emerge from that nexus. The first chapters tie the narrative suspense generated by the structure of serialization—that “remainder yet to come” that was advertised at the end of each novel’s installment (p. 2)—to the emergence of a credit economy driven largely by the silk market. Stories following the lives of the merchant class appeared next to reports on the silk market and commodity prices; financial speculation and speculative literary narratives produced hope for what one author calls “material and literary progress” in boom times, and fearful uncertainty in times of falling returns. Critiques of a financialized credit economy and credit-driven material consumption populated the Beirut-published novels of the 1870s and 1880s, warning readers of the dangers of debt and forgery that the “fictions of capital” and capital-as-fiction wrought. In the second half of the book, Holt’s analysis follows the flight of writers and capital from Beirut to Cairo, and reads the novels and journals produced by that diaspora as registering reactions to the “uncertain flow” of bodies, commodities, and finance (p. 102). Whereas Jurji Zaydan pioneered methods of publishing that turned away from serialization’s dependence on market movements, including the literary supplement and single-volume reprintings, Yaʿqub Sarruf glamorized the global integration of markets in an adventure novel of transnational finance that linked Cairo real estate to Tokyo ministers via cotton returns and war bonds. In order to tell this story, Holt constructs a new archive of the early Arabic novel that focuses on serialized novels, periodicals, and their literary supplements. Some of the most Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 633–665