Finland-Based “Altannour” Center Publishes New Critical Book by Sana Al-Shalan Titled Critical Inflections

Azzaman.info – Nouakchott:
The Finland-based Arab Cultural Center “Altannour,” headed by Iraqi expatriate writer Abbas Dakhil Hassan, has released a new critical book in English by the Jordanian academic and writer of Palestinian origin, Professor Dr. Sana Al-Shalan (Bint Na‘ima), titled Critical Inflections. The publication comes on the sidelines of her winning the 2025 Award for Best Arab Personality in the Scientific and Research Field.
The head of Altannour Center and the book’s publisher, Abbas Dakhil Hassan, said that the book represents a new critical imprint in Sana Al-Shalan’s solid academic and research career, and a valuable addition to the Arab critical library—particularly as it is published in English, allowing contemporary Arab literary models to reach readers beyond the Arabic-speaking world.
The book consists of 220 medium-sized pages and is composed of six specialized research chapters addressing narrative and cultural issues intersecting with concepts from Arab heritage. It studies works by contemporary Arab writers in the fields of the novel, short story, and epistolary literature.
The first chapter examines contemporary Arab novelistic models that rewrite heritage, while the second studies techniques of the marvelous/fantastic narration in Jordanian women’s novels. The third presents representations of men in Jordanian women’s short stories. The fourth chapter compares fantasy techniques in contemporary Arab novels with their counterparts in world literature, within the duality of satire and imagination. The fifth sheds light on the presence of popular folklore in contemporary Arab novels, and the sixth concludes with a study of contemporary Arab epistolary texts, revealing human and psychological dimensions that go beyond traditional literary discourse.
Sana Al-Shalan has authored hundreds of specialized critical studies, articles, and peer-reviewed academic papers published in several languages, including Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. She has also published numerous critical books in Arabic and English, such as: Myth in the Novels of Naguib Mahfouz, The Grotesque and the Marvelous in the Novel and Short Story in Jordan (1970–2002), The Chant of the Voice and the Revolution of the Echo, Al-Dawani wa Al-Ghawani: Branches in Contemporary Literature and Its Criticism, and The Mirage and the Lullaby of Light. Among her English critical works is:
So Close, Much Farther: Studies in Criticism.