Idris, Yusuf - Rasheed El-Enany (essay date 1997)
Rasheed El-Enany (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: El-Enany, Rasheed. “The Western Encounter in the Works of Yusuf Idris.” Research in African Literatures, 28, no. 3 (fall 1997): 33-55.
[In the following essay, El-Enany examines the East-West theme in two Idris stories, “Madame Vienna” and New York 80 in order to discuss his “preoccupation with this theme at various stages in his career.”]
The theme of the Arab in Europe, with all its cultural implications, is one that has found expression in Arabic fiction from a relatively early period in the evolution of the genre. The earliest mature attempts at treating the subject were those made by Tawfiq al-Hakim and Yahya Haqqi in ‘Usfur min al-sharq (1938; trans. as A Bird from the East) and Qindil 'Umm Hashim (1944; trans. as 'Umm Hashim's Lamp), respectively. Since the appearance of these two Egyptian works, which more or less established the theme in...
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