Of Other Cities

Abstract

This chapter expands the literary map beyond the boundaries of Cairo and moves to the coastal city of Alexandria. A city that was largely absent from the literary landscape throughout much of the twentieth century, the writers of this generation place it front and center in their fiction. Here the work of two natives of the city, Edwar al-Kharrat and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, who both produced “Alexandrian Trilogies” provides the impetus for this chapter. Both writers shift the focus away from the city of Cairo and present the city of Alexandria not only as the possible alternative for the Cairene exile (as in Naguib Mahfouz’s 1967 novel Miramar) but as a city with a complicated past and present. In works that blend autobiography and fiction, realism and the fantastic, the two novelists contend with the city’s colonial, cosmopolitan, and post-revolutionary contexts, calling into question Cairo’s position of dominance.