ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest thanks and gratitude to my distinguished

examiners, Professor Mohammad Enani who worked as professor of English at

the College of Arts, Cairo University. He was the editor of Sutoor (Lines)
and Almasrah (Theatre) periodicals. His literary career includes about 100
works ranging from writing to translating. His contributions to translation
from and into Arabic represent a great impact on promoting the level of
translation process and to provide the Arabic as well as foreign libraries with
a number of distinguished works especially in the field of literary creativity,
which promotes to mutually introduce the cultural and scientific components
of the European and Arabic civilizations.

The Poetics of New Historicism

in Selected Novels of The
Mamur Zapt Series by Michael
Pearce
A Cultural Study of the Egyptian Society under British
Imperialism in the Early Twentieth Century

Introduction
The study is a new historicist reading of Michael Pearces The Mamur Zapt and
the Return of the Carpet (1988), and The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog
(1989).
The reason behind this choice is the fact that New Historicism, as a critical
perspective, is primarily concerned with examining systems of power such as the
European colonial discourse, while, Mamur Zapt is a series which is concerned
with the subject of British colonization and imperialism; especially the dizzying
political situation in Egypt before World War I.
It primarily aims to examine the ideological approaches to imperialism and
colonialism in the twentieth-century-British culture after the end of the British
Empire.

Introduction
In particular, it seeks to examine to what extent Pearces texts are products of
these ideological approaches; how these novels display, react to, and get
influenced by these ideological approaches.
To fulfill this aim, the study adopts the new historicist perspective to read the
two selected novels of Mamur Zapt series that represent proper material for the
study in relation to the travel writing of Joseph McPhersons The Man Who
Loved Egypt: Bimbashi McPherson (1983).
In dealing with this topic, essential key terms such as historicist assumptions,
textuality, intertextuality, historicity, and contextuality are highlighted.

New Historicism
The Emergence of New Historicism is always cited by 1980.
It is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts,
usually of the same historical period (Barry 172).
It refuses to isolate literary criticism from the study of any source, paving the
way for exploring how cultural factors (social, economic, political,
biographical, or psychological phenomena) interact with the literary texts.
For New Historicism, history and literature are mutually imbricated
(Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3)
It considers history as initially a kind of discourse, which is not a denial that
there are real events (3).

New Historicism
New Historicism has greatly been influenced by the cultural anthropology of
Clifford Geertz.
It focus on the literary text as a cultural artifacts that can inform the reader
about the cultural discourses that circulate in any particular society.
Inspired by Foucault, new historicists frequently seek to study how power
works as the lower common denominator of all behaviors of the man.
The most typical procedures of New Historicism is to begin its analysis by
recounting an anecdote, which contains a microcosmic image of the power
relations, which the critic seeks to elaborate in relation to the main texts of
discussion (Brannigan 133).

Mamur Zapt Series

Mamur Zapt is a series written by the British novelist Michael Pearce (1933-),
who grew up in the (then) Anglo-Egyptian Sudan among the political and other
tensions he draws on for the novels of the series.
The series consists of 17th novels, the first was published in 1988, and the latest
one was published in 2013.
The series takes the reader back to the early-twentieth- century-Cairo, during
the indirect British imperialism of Egypt , and the nationalist rise of the
Egyptian movement, particularly in 1908, focusing on the political, not police,
matters during this period.
The series displays liberal social views, especially towards natives, and
harmful effects of British imperialism and colonialism.

Mamur Zapt Series

The Return of the Carpet focuses mainly on the tensions between the political
powers and British imperialism in Egypt.
It is about an attempt to assassinate Nuri Pasha, a veteran Egyptian politician.
In an attempt to figure out who is actually behind this accident, Owen and
Mahmoud uncover a plot to assassinate the Sirdar, the commander-in-chief of
the Egyptian Army.
The Night of the Dog focuses on religious sects, which the readers figure out,
as the story progresses, that they can also be political.
The main tensions in the novel are between the Christian Copts and the
Moslems.

The Methodology of Study

In this study, it is anticipated that the new historicist methods can examine the
novels approach to the pervasive ideas of the twentieth century.
The study can determine to what extent Pearces texts are the products of the
ideology of the time, i.e. imperialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism, and to
what extent they are against the ideology, especially after the end of the British
Empire.
The study, therefore, is based on a parallel reading of the novels in relation to The
Man Who Loved Egypt, which is distilled from some twenty-five volumes of
correspondence of Joseph McPherson covering a long, and various, life in Egypt.
This text provides narrative accounts and analyses of the political, social, and
religious practices, and the cultural discourses that enabled British imperialism to
seize power of Egypt in the late ninetieth and early twentieth century.

The study consists of the following three chapters:

Chapter Poetics Of New Historicism: a Critical Review
One

Postcolonialism as a Historical Context of Mamur Zapt

Chapter
Series
Two
Chapter Between West and East
Three

I. Poetics of New Historicism: a Critical Review

This chapter, Poetics of New Historicism: A Critical Review, presents a short
review of New Historicism as a critical base of this study.
It reviews New Historicism in a systematic critical framework for the study:
1. It is categorized according to the phases of New Historicisms
development as a critical practice.
2. It reviews New Historicisms rise, key concepts, criticism, and methods
of analysis.

II. Postcolonialism as a Historical Context of Mamur Zapt

Series
The second chapter, Postcolonialism as a Historical Context of Mamur Zapt
Series, opens with reviewing some seminal concepts of imperialism,
colonialism, and postcolonialism.
Then, it put both the Mamur Zapt series and The Man Who Loved Egypt:
Bimbashi McPherson in their historical context.
It recounts the plots of the two selected novels. In addition, it gives a glance of
Bimbashi McPherson.
Finally, yet importantly, it associates the novels with the travel writings of Josef
McPherson by tracing the resemblances the two genres.

III. Between West and East

The last chapter, Between West and East, is the new historicist reading of the
two novels.
The framework of this new historicist reading shows how the novels reflect the
colonial discourse by discussing these three themes: the other, violence,
and disorder.
The chapter concludes that although the two novels, The Return of the Carpet
and The Night of the Dog, apparently provide numerous possibilities of
subverting the image of British Empire as the mother country, they contain
this within a narrative that relies on European domination of the Arabian other.

 I would also like to express my deepest thanks and gratitude to my

distinguished examiner Professor Eman Adawy, for allowing me

the

honor

of

being

their

examinee.