North Africa: an introduction

Book section : Chapter

This chapter looks at the institutions of literature in North Africa, such as publishing, the university, libraries, and so on. The modern history of the region shows that it has been all but stable, with the rise and fall of poles of influence and drastic changes in the social and political landscape. These are addressed with a view to sketching dominant, emerging, and receding tendencies in the literary fields of North Africa, a historical perspective which looks anew and critically into widely held assumptions, such as the rise of the novel, Egyptian dominance, and the hegemony of French in the Maghreb. Multilingualism in the region is also dealt in this chapter, but it is both a source and an outcome of this multi-vectorial traffic, giving us the very different textures of literature in each country and forcing us to look for singularity beyond the recognizable common threads.

Authors: Omri, M-S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Host title: A Companion to African Literatures
• Pages: 103-115
• Chapter number: 7
• Series: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Place of publication: Hoboken, NJ, USA
• Publication date: 2021-01-09
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1002/9781119058199.ch7
• EISBN: 9781119058199
• ISBN: 9781119058175
• Language: English
• Keywords: literary fields; multilingualism; North Africa; political landscape; social landscape
• Subtype: Chapter