A Bridge Too Soon: 'Afifa Karam and the Arabic Novel in the United States (Critical Arab American Studies)

More than a century before contemporary debates about Arab American identity, a Lebanese immigrant woman in New York City was championing intercultural dialogue and women’s solidarity across cultural divides through the radical medium of the Arabic novel. ?Afifa Karam (1883-1924) not only wrote groundbreaking fiction; she also theorized the novel as a genre that could empower immigrant women readers at a time when the Arabic novel itself had yet to gain acceptance as a legitimate literary form. Elizabeth Saylor offers the first comprehensive study of Karam’s life and work, recovering a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the nahda, the Arabic cultural renaissance.Drawing on Karam’s journalism in the New York-based newspaper al-Huda and her three published novels, Saylor reveals how this writer, journalist, and translator developed a distinctly gendered theory of fiction while addressing the urgent questions facing Syrian immigrants navigating between Arab and American cultures.Karam’s nov