The Paper deals with the theme of the representation of Europe in present-day Arabic narrative discourse. In the first part, which is mainly theoretical, the notion of Occidentalism is defined with particular reference to the concept of “the political  unconscious” elaborated  by the American literary theorist Frederic Jameson. After a brief discussion of some Egyptian narrative works that exemplify Occidentalism representations of Europe, the paper centres around a new tendency emerged in the Arabic narrative output of the 90s where the relationship between  the definition of the Self and the representation of Europe appears inverted with respect to Occidentalism.

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