Shared Margins

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In contrast to most recent studies on literary and artistic expression in Egypt and the Middle East, Shared Margins de-centres metropolitan cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, this books gives a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts: "About Writing" and "Writing About", the book Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination (part 1), and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011 (part 2). Literary writing, the book argues, is a limited excess, a site of exploration and experimentation that is neither fully free, nor fully contained by the traditions and social relations it draws upon. Literature as an institution and a social activity thrives upon the tension between its heterotopic nature posited outside ordinary life, on the one hand, and its capacity to participate in the shaping and reshaping of lives and lifestyles, on the other.