Towards an Egyptian Bildungsroman: The National Intellectual after the 1919 Revolution in Naguib Mahfouz&apos;s <i>Sugar Street</i>

Abstract

Reading Naguib Mahfouz's Sugar Street (1957) as a Bildungsroman, I argue that Mahfouz creates an Egyptian Bildungsroman that relies on constant revision of European forms and a merging of local and global paradigms to fit the Egyptian socio-historical context. Mahfouz rejects both the traditional Bildungsroman as well as classical indigenous forms as signifiers of mimicry and petrification respectively. While the resolution of the Bildungsroman entails the negation of the Other, whose maturation is requisite upon accepting models that marginalize him/her, classical models render the Other a geographic and temporal anachronism. In place of the traditional Bildungsroman and classical Arabic literary models, Mahfouz advocates for an eclectic paradigm that changes with the historical moment.