The Lebanese Post-civil War Novel ─ Memory, Trauma, and Capital

After the Lebanese Civil War, many of Lebanon's best known novelists committed themselves to building a "memory for the future." More than twenty years later, Elias Khoury's and Rashid al-Daif's postwar novels rank among the most important texts in contemporary Arabic literature and a new generation of authors has begun writing about the civil war. The role of collective and individual trauma seems to be central to this development. However, as this book will show, the Lebanese Post-civil war novel is a response not so much to trauma, but to the forces at work in the literary field. From the book market to literary prizes and the similarity of the writers' biographies and socio-economic backgrounds, a number of factors worked in favor of novels offering a literary war narrative for Lebanon's secular upper-middle class.

Felix Lang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg, Germany.