Introduction: gender, nation, and the canon of the Arabic novel -- Beginnings: discourses on ideal manhood and ideal womanhood -- The new man: conflicting masculinities in the fiction of Haikal, al-Mazini, and al-Rafi'i -- Tawfiq al-Hakim and the civilizational novel -- Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy: a national allegory -- Latifa al-Zayyat: gender and nationalist politics -- Defeated masculinities in Sonallah Ibrahim -- The personal is political: debating the new writing in the 1990s -- The postcolonial nomadic novel -- Liminal spaces/liminal identities: Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Ahmed Alaidy, and Muhammad 'Ala' al-Din -- Postscript: after Tahrir: imagining otherwise.