Abstract

The novel as a literary genre emerged with the rise of the middle class and their political ideology of nationalism. The emergence of a postcolonial national identity in modern Iraq accompanied the spread of the novel genre as a key cultural medium that helped to formulate the national identity of the new state. Much has been written about the Iraqi novel especially when it starts to gain much popularity after the 2003 American invasion of the country. However, it has been usually studied in the context of literary criticism via its different schools and approaches. This paper studies the Iraqi novel at the turn of the century as a cultural phenomenon that not only represents but also formulates the national identity of the contemporary Iraqi state. To avoid generalizations, the paper focusses on two significant novels by Iraqi writer Ali Bader: Papa Sartre (2001) and the Tobacco Keeper (2008). The paper follows combines textual analysis of the two novels with cultural reading of their larger context following Richard Johnson's (1986) approach of studying cultural phenomena via the three phases of their production context and formulating conditions, their status as texts to be culturally consumed and analyzed, and finally the responses or outcomes that emerge from consuming these cultural texts. This three-phase approach provides rewarding insights into the selected literary texts as they function and interact within their cultural space, redefining and remaking the fragmented and problematic identity formations that they are written in and that they engage with.