To characterize Sa???dallah Wannous as an Arab writer is, at the same time, to say something essential about his identity and his oeuvre and assert something potentially misleading for many English-language readers, who probably know few writers from the Arab world except perhaps the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, or Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in 1988. The confusion evoked by characterizing Wannous an an Arab writer is likely to be compounded by the fact ...
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To characterize Sa???dallah Wannous as an Arab writer is, at the same time, to say something essential about his identity and his oeuvre and assert something potentially misleading for many English-language readers, who probably know few writers from the Arab world except perhaps the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, or Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in 1988. The confusion evoked by characterizing Wannous an an Arab writer is likely to be compounded by the fact that he is Syrian, and the little that well-read English speakers probably know about Syria's history and culture has been filtered through the narrow lends of the Western media's coverage of the brutal civil war that began in 2011. Moreover, Wannous is known principally as a playwright even in the Arab world, and few literate people, with the exception of specialists and theater artists, read plays--as opposed to seeing them performed--with the possible exception of those of Shakespeare. The current volume, which is the first widely distributed English-language anthology devoted to Wannous's plays and writings about theater, is, however, likely to change more than a few minds about the pleasures of reading plays, especially since Wannous clearly intended that his works should be read simultaneously as cultural critiques, political and philosophical treatises, and innovative rewritings of traditional storytelling and performance modes, as well as serious dramas to be staged--page xiii.
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