Field Construction

By every indicator'methodology, citations, paper titles'students of Arabic literature have been courting 'theory' for decades. From the 1970s on, scholars have approached classical and modern Arabic literature with theoretical models that draw explicitly on structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, performance studies, and so on. That said, until recently the mainstream of modern Arabic studies continued to use methods inherited from Orientalist scholars working on classical texts. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.