Multiculturalism and Arab American Literature

This book highlights clear multicultural and multi-intellectual common concerns between Arab-American writers and colleagues from the Western World, particularly from the United States, and Britain. These concerns are related to issues narrating multiculturalism, transcendentalism, cross-cultural approaches to reconciliation and futurism. This was a clear attempt to build an intellectual bridge between East and West, and to capture a glimpse of the spirit of cultural tolerance and dialogue, between the ever existing two poles, since the early twentieth century. This theme is dealt with through literary studies reviewing the issues of writing in English as a necessary language for global communication. It focuses on early writings out of western experiences, and how American transcendentalism could be “Orientalized”. The reader of this book is provided, for the first time, with a comparison between The Book of Khalid and The Prophet. A final concern addressed, as a case study, is the possibility of cross-cultural approaches to reconciliation. This book is one of the few references on the subject of Arab American Literature of the twentieth century.