Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.

The Introduction turns to Terry Eagleton’s comment on reading Naipaul (“Great art, dreadful politics”) and asks how critics have addressed this quandary about a great writer. It looks at the critical essays on Naipaul by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Sara Suleri in particular to examine how Naipaul’s works challenge the idea of “postcolonial arrival.” The overall thesis of the book is summed up as a reading in which an author “reads us.” To undertake this project, the work is grounded in a systematic examination of all of the author’s published and unpublished works, the secondary bibliography, and material deposited in the Naipaul Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. To make a case for Naipaul’s place in global literary culture, there are four key impulses that govern the book. They are: history, aesthetics, textual engagement, and archival knowledge. To give meaning to that achievement, this book is written with thematic unities in mind. Although chronology is not totally dispensed with, the chapters are structured with the aim of establishing connections within Naipaul’s heterogeneous corpus. But for that interconnectedness to succeed, Naipaul followed an uncompromising commitment to writing as an aesthetic endeavour, uninhibited by fashion or ideology.

Although Gellius is fully committed to the fashion for pre-classical authors, admiring them as writers and not merely as quarries for striking words or exponents of sound morality, comparison of his quotations with Ciceros shows a shift in taste away from raw power towards greater sophistication. His understanding of the passages cited, in so far as the state of their texts allows us to judge, is generally sound; however, some comments need a closer examination.

The decade of the 1960s provoked a specific interest in Latin America and its literature, largely owing to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the attention it paid to the struggle in the cultural field. If until that point the continent’s great writers were perceived as isolated figures, the new context after 1959 created the conditions for them to be read as part of a group that was committed to the common duty of putting a new face on Latin American literature. In fact, the so-called Boom cannot be understood without considering the specific political context that acted as its sounding board. An intrinsic part of the atmosphere at the time, then, were heated debates that foregrounded the role of the intellectual in society, intense polemics regarding the limits of freedom of expression under socialism, and fiery conflicts about the status of literature in a revolutionary society. Paradoxically, the very same period was also seen by its protagonists as one of transition toward a new, as yet undefined, stage. If the decade of the 1960s was dominated by left-wing thought and by the idea of the continental revolution, the 1970s meant the withdrawal of the left, and a gradual rise for the right. In its own way – always and naturally tangentially – literature has narrated all those transitions.

The decade of the 1960s provoked a specific interest in Latin America and its literature, largely owing to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the attention it paid to the struggle in the cultural field. If until that point the continent’s great writers were perceived as isolated figures, the new context after 1959 created the conditions for them to be read as part of a group that was committed to the common duty of putting a new face on Latin American literature. In fact, the so-called Boom cannot be understood without considering the specific political context that acted as its sounding board. An intrinsic part of the atmosphere at the time, then, were heated debates that foregrounded the role of the intellectual in society, intense polemics regarding the limits of freedom of expression under socialism, and fiery conflicts about the status of literature in a revolutionary society. Paradoxically, the very same period was also seen by its protagonists as one of transition toward a new, as yet undefined, stage. If the decade of the 1960s was dominated by left-wing thought and by the idea of the continental revolution, the 1970s meant the withdrawal of the left, and a gradual rise for the right. In its own way – always and naturally tangentially – literature has narrated all those transitions.

Lebanese and Syrian immigrant women living in the Americas, or the mahjar, published some of the earliest Arabic novels and women’s journals as part of the nahḍa, or the Arabic literary and cultural renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The cultural hub of this Arabic literary movement in America was New York City’s first Arab immigrant neighborhood, “Little Syria,” located just blocks from what is now known as “Ground Zero.” A consideration of works by diasporic Arab women writers North and South America both 1) reframes the Arab nahḍa as a transnational movement, and 2) expands the definition of what can be considered “American literature.” By shedding light on this neglected archive – and re-inserting Arab women into the wider American historical and literary narratives from which they have long been erased – this essay demonstrates that “Arabs” are in fact an important, yet neglected, part of American history.