Mahfouz's Al Karnak Cafe as a Cultural Artifact of Egyption History

The book explore the creative representation of Egyptian history in the novel Al Karnak cafe by Naguib Mahfouz. The study adopts New Historicism theory as a corner stone through the process of deconstruction. Within the broad framework of New Historicism, the concept of textuality is employed in the methodology. The book is guided by three main research issues,the ways in which the novel reveals parallelisms or similarities with key events in Egyptian history,the ways in which it reveals an artistic portrayal of key events in Egyptian history and the conclusions that can be drawn from the ideological construction of the revisioning of Egyptian history. the book adopts Serpil’s explanation of textuality that both historical and fictional writing bonds together in a synchronic configuration. In fact, both historical and literary texts are creations of linguistic operations of language, and they are evidently marked by their nature of textuality. the book studies the textuality of history as portrayed in the novel and discover the credibility of Mahfouz’s interpretation of historical events during the era of the novel revisioning the past that the novel produces.