SOURCE: “Re-Reading Women in/to Naguib Mahfouz's Al-Liss wa‘l kilab (The Thief and the Dogs),” in Research in American Literatures, Vol. 28, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 5–16.

In the following essay, Hartman analyzes the role of female characters in Mahfouz's The Thief and the Dogs.

This article rereads women both in and into Naguib Mahfouz's short 1961 novel, al-Liss wa‘l kilab. By reading women in this novel, I mean a close reading of the two women portrayed in the novel in order to explore how they are textually constructed as characters. By reading women into the text, I mean to examine the textual function of specific female characters to comment upon their significance to this novel as well as to Mahfouz's entire oeuvre.

Why is it important to read the female characters in and into this novel? There is a small but growing number of articles concerned with women in...