Hala Kamal (Ph.D.)

This chapter offers a discussion of three texts by bicultural Egyptian writers: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Radwa Ashour’s Specters (1999), and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights (2010). The three works are read via an autofictional lens, with focus on Ghali’s autofictional identity, Ashour’s autofictional threads, and al-Tahawy’s autofictionalizing experience. The study suggests that autofictionality can be identified in the texts in terms of genre as well as technique, demonstrating the potential of the autofictional as a literary strategy in negotiating identity, memory, and experience in the writing of Egyptian literature. Our reading of the three texts testifies to the affordance of an autofictional lens in reading Arabic literature and allows new insights into writing at the intersection of reality and the imagination.

This chapter offers a feminist critique of the strategies used in translating Virginia Woolf’s work into Arabic. The study opens with a historical overview of Woolf’s works translated into Arabic since the 1960s, followed by a discussion of the critical approaches to the translated texts from a feminist perspective, with particular emphasis on the significance of a paratextual analysis. A whole section of the chapter is devoted to examining Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a case study of the translation of Woolf into Arabic. The chapter ends by highlighting the ethical dimensions embedded in the translation strategies related to Virginia Woolf and feminist texts in general. The study examines the representation of Woolf in Egypt and the Arab World, and points out the shift from emphasis on Woolf as a modernist novelist to a feminist writer.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, translation, representation, feminist, modernist, paratexts, Arab World.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of feminism and gender awareness in translation and translation studies today.
Bringing together work from more than 20 different countries – from Russia to Chile, Yemen, Turkey, China, India, Egypt and the Maghreb as well as the UK, Canada, the USA and Europe – this Handbook represents a transnational approach to this topic, which is in development in many parts of the world. With 41 chapters, this book presents, discusses, and critically examines many different aspects of gender in translation and its effects, both local and transnational.
Providing overviews of key questions and case studies of work currently in progress, this Handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation, feminism, and gender.

'This handbook is a superb resource for scholars and translators. Its finely calibrated content and structure sets a new standard for future research on gender and translation. The editors succeeded brilliantly in bringing thematic and structural coherence to chapters concerned with diverse topics and approaches and authored by a culturally diverse group of scholars. An impressive scholarly accomplishment, the handbook offers fundamental and timely readings on gender, feminist, and queer theories and translation that are highly relevant to everyone involved in translation and translation studies.'
Karin Bauer, McGill University, Canada

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Emilia Di Martino, Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Italy