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Michelle Hartman, professor of Arabic language and literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, has provided a very interesting reading of the rescriptings, within their multiple contexts, of three religious figures--Joseph, Jesus, and Job--in secular literary works by three Lebanese women authors: Andrée Chedid's La femme de Job (Job's Wife), written in French; Huda Barakat's Hajar al-dahik (The Stone of Laughter), written in Arabic; and Najwa Barakat's Hayat wa-alam Hamad ibn Silana (The Passion of Hamad Ibn Silana), also written in Arabic. The aim is to explore how religious figures and tales from the past are rewritten in today's world, thus bringing out a diversity of meanings that can give us essential messages about the society, gender, community, and nation from which they emerged. The originality of Hartman's theoretical approach is her use of the concepts of métissage and border spaces.
The work is organized into two main parts. The first part deals with theoretical and methodological considerations and is divided into three chapters dealing with: (1) reading literature in contexts to show the multiplicity of Lebanese identities linked to language and multi-confessionalism and emphasizing the importance of hybridity in a society in which conflicting elements...