Elsadda brilliantly upends standing understandings of the Arabic novel. Nuanced and incisive, she dissects over a century of Egyptian Arabic novels, demonstrating that the liberal national elites gendered imaginations of the nation shaped the literary canon. She convincingly argues that national political projects must imagine themselves through cultural production and that both are systematically shot through with gendered constructions of power. -- Suad Joseph, Professor of Anthropology and Women and Gender Studies, University of California, Davis
