This dissertation discusses the importance of Alem, Alsanea, and al-Sharif in the elevation of Saudi Arabian national literature to the level of world literature: can these three Saudi Arabian female writers be labeled as world writers? By discussing Alem’s My Thousand and One N…
While a vast range of works have been written on European identity from historical, cultural, political, sociological, and economic points of view, I am attempting to turn the discourse around and investigate the complex notion of European identity that forms the basis of person…
At a time when scholars have rekindled the old debate about what is world literature and how can one study it (Casanova, 2004; Moretti, 2000, 2003; Damrosch, 2003, 2009), this thesis analyses the canonisation of Central American Revolutionary women's writing as it moves toward t…
This dissertation explores points of literary contact between Arabic and English novels in order to write a transnational history of the genre. Focusing on early novels that think beyond the nation--English novels of the eighteenth century that imagine the East and Arabic novels…
This dissertation examines contemporary Mayan literature in Chiapas, Mexico (1983-2010) and Palestinian literature in Israel (1976-2010). It performs an understudied comparison between the literary traditions of two indigenous minorities emerging from the Global South and the Fo…
This dissertation asks how comics allow us to rethink the imagination and representation of the world and its inhabitants. I argue that by making questions of translation visible, comics provide tools to rethink world literacies. Rather than utilize comics to create a more unive…
This dissertation examines late 19th- and early 20th-century Arabic literary texts on China to challenge the Eurocentric scholarly assumption that writers in the Nahda period drew their models of modernity solely from Europe. Surviving only in fragmented and unexplored archives,…
This study focused on incoming college students' participation in a multicultural book club in which they read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart . Sub-questions addressed the following: individual participants' responses to the novel, how participants' involvement in the group d…
The Limits of Secular Criticism: World Literature at the Crossroads of Empires offers a colonial history of literature at the intersections of the French and British empires, nineteenth-century moral education and reforms in Qur'anic instruction. My argument is that literature, …