The Prostitute In Progressive Literature
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few figures in world literature have been as simultaneously condemned and mythologised as the prostitute, and Khalid Kishtainy's The Prostitute in Progressive Literature presents a rigorous and illuminating study of how this archetype has been wielded by writers across cultures and centuries as a weapon of social critique. Drawing on a vast canon of progressive fiction — from the realist novels of 19th-century Europe to the politically charged writings of the developing world — Kishtainy argues that the prostitute, far from being a mere peripheral character, stands at the very heart of literature's engagement with capitalism, patriarchy, class struggle, and moral hypocrisy. With a scholar's precision and a storyteller's clarity, he chronicles how authors from Zola and Dostoevsky to lesser-known voices of the Arab literary tradition have deployed the figure of the fallen woman to unmask the brutal contradictions of modern society. This is a work of genuine intellectual ambition, situating literary analysis within a broad framework of political and economic thought. Kishtainy illustrates how the prostitute functions not merely as a symbol of victimhood, but as a mirror held up to the societies that both create and condemn her — a radical act of literary subversion. His comparative approach, spanning Western and non-Western traditions with equal authority, challenges the reader to reconsider the very boundaries of progressive thought itself. For anyone who believes that literature is inseparable from the struggle for justice, this study raises an unsettling and essential question: what does it reveal about a society, that it takes a woman's degradation to tell its deepest truths?
Author: Khalid Kishtainy
Format: Hardback
Genre: Literary theory
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Few figures in world literature have been as simultaneously condemned and mythologised as the prostitute, and Khalid Kishtainy's The Prostitute in Progressive Literature presents a rigorous and illuminating study of how this archetype has been wielded by writers across cultures and centuries as a weapon of social critique. Drawing on a vast canon of progressive fiction — from the realist novels of 19th-century Europe to the politically charged writings of the developing world — Kishtainy argues that the prostitute, far from being a mere peripheral character, stands at the very heart of literature's engagement with capitalism, patriarchy, class struggle, and moral hypocrisy. With a scholar's precision and a storyteller's clarity, he chronicles how authors from Zola and Dostoevsky to lesser-known voices of the Arab literary tradition have deployed the figure of the fallen woman to unmask the brutal contradictions of modern society. This is a work of genuine intellectual ambition, situating literary analysis within a broad framework of political and economic thought. Kishtainy illustrates how the prostitute functions not merely as a symbol of victimhood, but as a mirror held up to the societies that both create and condemn her — a radical act of literary subversion. His comparative approach, spanning Western and non-Western traditions with equal authority, challenges the reader to reconsider the very boundaries of progressive thought itself. For anyone who believes that literature is inseparable from the struggle for justice, this study raises an unsettling and essential question: what does it reveal about a society, that it takes a woman's degradation to tell its deepest truths?