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Mara Naaman. Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature: Portraits of Cairo. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011. Xxv, 227 pp.
Mara Naaman's Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature is part of the exciting growing literature situated at the disciplinary crossroads of literary/cultural studies and urban studies/social geography. Writing in the tradition of the theoretical explorations of space and place pioneered by the likes of Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Edward Soja, and Mike Davis, Naaman and other similarly oriented contemporary critics takes as their point of departure how-space being zoned, politicized, and symbolically laden-places produce texts, which in turn make these sites "legible" for readers (pp. 1, 11-12). Naaman's study focuses on recent novelistic representations of the Wust al-Balad district of Cairo, a quarter developed-based on the model of Hausssmann's Paris-during the eighteen sixties and seventies in order to present a "modern" face of Egyptian to...