English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

In the early 1970s, Syrian-born author, Ghada al-Samman authored two essays on the supernatural based, in part, on her experiences in Beirut. These essays mark the beginning of what I identify as her sustained literary interest in the supernatural. While al-Samman’s political investments as a feminist and leftist writer have been the primary lenses through which critics have considered her work, this essay recenters her literary contributions. Focusing on her Lebanese civil war trilogy, I explore how she constructs and sustains a supernatural literary sensibility over the course of several decades, amalgamating Arabo-Islamic cosmologies, Euro-American psychoanalytic notions, and Shakespearean aesthetics. The result, I argue, is a supernatural hermeneutic which highlights the irreparable damage of both pre-war and wartime environs to the individual soul and the body politic.

Lebanon in the Devil’s Waters: the literary supernatural in Ghada al-Samman’s civil war trilogy