The rich and lengthy Arabic corpus of fantastic fiction is one hidden in plain sight. In more broad studies of both fantastic fiction and Arabic literary and cultural history, it is notably absent. It is rarely, if ever, read as a corpus, much less as one with a rich, meandering, and turbulent history.

As fantastic modes have risen in global popularity over the past two decades, this book joins the revisionist wave of exciting critical interventions questioning the cornerstones of cultural history. It reads the current proliferation of Arabic fantastic stories as a potent return of the repressed and illuminates the persistence of premodern forms and narratives in contemporary cultural practice. Moreover, the book proposes essential categories, epistemes and historical timelines for effectively understanding the corpus of the modern Arabic fantastic, arguing that the fantastic is becoming a modern realism of our times.