Ecocriticism and Sufi Mysticism in The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories: an Eco-Mythological Approach

Document Type : Original Article

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Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Minia University, Minia, Egypt.

Abstract

This article attempts to explore how the Mythological and Ecocritical approaches can coalesce to offer an insight into the north Afro-Arab Sudanese village world represented in Tayeb Salih’s collection The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories. Considering that it is mostly understudied as compared to other literary works by Salih, previous critiques on The Wedding of Zein focused separately on either the Sufi interpretation of the text and the distorted figure of Zein, the postcolonial gothic, or the preservation of the African identity in a changing world. This article, however, investigates two main notions: first taking the regular religious Sufi analysis into another level of combining Sufi mysticism and shared universal mythological archetypes on the one hand, and Sufi mysticism and Ecocriticism on the other hand. Second, applying the perceptions of Ecocriticism that has seldom been applied to Sudanese literature in general and Salih's in particular. Concepts of the nurturing of nature, maldevelopment, and social unity in face of modernity are inspected though the lens of the coined Eco-Mythological approach.           

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Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 3, Issue 4
October 2022
Pages 225-240

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