L’amor di terra lontana nella narrativa araba contemporanea

In Arabic contemporary literature, the representation of love for a person coming from a Western country has been the subject of various fictional works. Most of these novels identify the love stories as paradigmatic examples of the broader East-West debate, or issues related to the literature of diaspora and migration. Object of this study is, in particular, the novel Rawà'iḥ Marie-Claire (The scent of Marie-Claire, 2008) by the Tunisian writer Habib Selmi. Through the love affair between Maḥfūẓ a Tunisian leaving in Paris and his French girlfriend, Marie-Claire, it is possible to identify a further step in the Arab representation of the West, and particularly in the representation of a new Arab male identity.