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Against the critical tendency to dismiss nostalgia as a sentimental trope of immigrant narratives, Qutait sheds light on the creative uses to which it is put in the works of Rabih Alameddine, Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Leila Aboulela, Randa Jarrar, Rawi Hage, and others.    Arguing for the necessity of theorising cultural memory beyond Eurocentric frameworks, the book demonstrates how Arab novelists writing in English draw on nostalgia as a touchstone of Arabic literary tradition from pre-Islamic poetry to the present. Qutait situates Anglophone Arab fiction within contentious debates about the place of the past in the Arab world, tracing how writers have deployed nostalgia as an aesthetic strategy to deal with subject matter ranging from the Islamic golden age, the era of anti-colonial struggle, the failures of the postcolonial state and of pan-Arabism, and the perennial issue of the diaspora's relationship to the homeland.    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This English translation of a 2004 Saudi novel, Banat al-Riyadh, is written in the form of emails exchanged between four young women. At home, it acted as a catalyst for a rash of Saudi mass-market novels with suggestive titles, such as Samar al-Migrin's Women of Vice and Athir Abdullah's I loved you more than I should, while in the West it fed a growing appetite for, and fascination with, works that reveal the secret lives of Muslim women. Represented in these novels is a relatively privileged generation; through the licit use of the internet and international travel, they have been exposed to cosmopolitan mores and have come to expect basic levels of freedom of expression and movement. However, the international acclaim for al-Sanae was for the most part not accompanied by insights into where such novels could be situated in a Saudi literary canon.  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