Although theoretically-informed literary criticism over the last thirty to forty years has, quite correctly, attacked earlier approaches which read works of literature as emanations of the author’s biography, there are, arguably, still instances where a writer’s oeuvre makes no sense whatsoever if divorced from their life experiences. That is particularly true of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, much of whose life instantiated the problems faced by the Palestinian people in general – dispossession and displacement at the hands of the Israelis in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948; reduction to the Kafkaesque status of “present absentees” with no rights, papers or land; a choice between an existence under …
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Citation: Williams, Patrick. "Mahmoud Darwish". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 April 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12674, accessed 22 November 2024.]
