SOURCE: El-Enany, Rasheed. “The Western Encounter in the Works of Yusuf Idris.” Research in African Literatures, 28, no. 3 (fall 1997): 33-55.

In the following essay, El-Enany examines the East-West theme in two Idris stories, “Madame Vienna” and New York 80 in order to discuss his “preoccupation with this theme at various stages in his career.”

The theme of the Arab in Europe, with all its cultural implications, is one that has found expression in Arabic fiction from a relatively early period in the evolution of the genre. The earliest mature attempts at treating the subject were those made by Tawfiq al-Hakim and Yahya Haqqi in ‘Usfur min al-sharq (1938; trans. as A Bird from the East) and Qindil 'Umm Hashim (1944; trans. as 'Umm Hashim's Lamp), respectively. Since the appearance of these two Egyptian works, which more or less established the theme in Arabic fiction, fresh approaches to it by later Egyptian and...