Mervat Aljomaa | Sohar University (original) (raw)
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Papers by Mervat Aljomaa
The start of the new millennium has witnessed literary interest in young adult fiction and a prom... more The start of the new millennium has witnessed literary interest in young adult fiction and a prominent rise in its popularity. My research focuses on the dynamics of adolescent narrative and the representations of the adolescent subject in a number of contemporary mainstream young adult novels with the aim of understanding adolescence as an inscribed literary identity. I take, as my starting point, Julia Kristeva's definition of adolescence as an open, non-biologically limited, psychic structure. This notion, when applied to young adult fiction, suggests that the texts work to construct psychologically-open implied readers, which in diverse ways echo and affirm the desires and expectations of real readers. While the introduction surveys contemporary critical currents in children and young adult fiction and places my research into context, each of the subsequent chapters examines one or more literary works by a single author. The main literary works discussed in this study includ...
Journal of Arabic Literature
This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllā... more This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article...
The start of the new millennium has witnessed literary interest in young adult fiction and a prom... more The start of the new millennium has witnessed literary interest in young adult fiction and a prominent rise in its popularity. My research focuses on the dynamics of adolescent narrative and the representations of the adolescent subject in a number of contemporary mainstream young adult novels with the aim of understanding adolescence as an inscribed literary identity. I take, as my starting point, Julia Kristeva's definition of adolescence as an open, non-biologically limited, psychic structure. This notion, when applied to young adult fiction, suggests that the texts work to construct psychologically-open implied readers, which in diverse ways echo and affirm the desires and expectations of real readers. While the introduction surveys contemporary critical currents in children and young adult fiction and places my research into context, each of the subsequent chapters examines one or more literary works by a single author. The main literary works discussed in this study includ...
Journal of Arabic Literature
This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllā... more This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article...