Mola is the publisher of the Persian edition, which carries painstaking details by translator Amir-Hossein Allahyari.

This volume of the Cambridge “History of Arabic Literature” provides the first authoritative, comprehensive, critical survey of creative writing in Arabic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. 

The rise of secular education, printing and journalism created a new reading public, and Western ideas and literary forms, notably the novel, the short story and drama, became influential. 

This book examines the attempts made by Arab men and women to adopt the imported forms as well as the indigenous literary tradition to meet the requirements of the modern world. 

Quoted material is given in English translation and there is an extensive bibliography.

Badawi was a scholar of English and Arabic literature. He was a Research Fellow of St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford from 1967 to 1969, and was then elected to the College’s Governing Body. Upon retirement in 1992, he became an Emeritus Fellow.

Born in Egypt in 1925, he received his Ph.D. at the University of London in 1954, with a thesis on Coleridge’s criticism of Shakespeare, later published in 1973 by Cambridge University Press as Coleridge: Critic of Shakespeare, which was reprinted in 2010. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 554 libraries. 

He then became Assistant Professor of English at the University of Cairo and moved to Oxford University in 1964, where he lectured at Brasenose College until retirement in 1992. 

He became a fellow of St. Antony’s College (1967-2012), where he was the first lecturer in Modern Arabic at the new Middle East Centre of the college.

He left an endowment at Oxford University for the payment of the “Mustafa Badawi Prize in Modern Arabic Literature” which is awarded for “the best English essay on some aspect of modern Arabic literature of up to 15,000 words,” which demonstrated “sensitivity to modern Arabic literary texts as well as some originality and skill in critical analysis.”

Source:Tehran Times