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The Libyan Novel

This is the first book in English-language scholarship to introduce the development of the Libyan novel through in-depth analyses of its main authors, and broader reference to many others. It is also the first to engage Arabic literature with the ‘animal turn’ in the Humanities and Social Sciences, reading Libyan fiction through the lens of the ‘creaturely’, understood both through Eric Santner’s interpretation of it as an expression of a particularly human experience of subjection to sovereign power (On Creaturely Life, 2008), and Anat Pick’s reading of it as an engagement with the boundary between human and animal, binding environmental and political injustice (Creaturely Poetics, 2011). Through both readings, the monograph brings new comparative perspectives to modern Arabic literature, as well as highlighting central themes and aesthetics of the Libyan novel. While understanding animals as an allegory for human suffering, the monograph explores how they prompt reflection on the universal vulnerability of all creatures, human and nonhuman, within an uncertain world. With their ‘silence’ expressive of the nation’s international marginality and the denial of fundamental freedoms within it, and their imprisonment and mortality a commentary on the loss of traditional nomadism, as Libya transforms into a dictatorial, rentier state, animals represent multi-layered allegories, all underpinned by an expression of shared vulnerability.