Arabic-English Intercultural and Interlingual Contacts in Ahdaf Soueif’s Novels: A Case of WEs ‘Contact Literature’ in the Expanding Area

Historically, “[s]everal genres of so-called ‘contact literature’ have arisen in the Outer Circle English” (Bennui & Hashim, 2014, p. 80, see also Kachru 1986). Today, ‘contact literature’ is emerging in some Expanding areas as well, such as in Egypt (Albakry & Hancock, 2008; Hassanin, 2012; Lebœuf, 2012), as a new domain where English is creatively used. This article, which is part of a wider research project, aims at investigating the phenomenon of intercultural and interlingual contacts in the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s novel In the Eye of the Sun (1992). In the novel, the author uses English, rather than Arabic, her mother-tongue, for creative expression and as a tool to relate about post-colonial Egypt, which leads to a continuous use of culture-bound references, literary code-switching, lexical borrowing, and linguistic transfers from Arabic. In the footstep of Albakry & Hancock’s (2008) study, this paper’s methodology is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the occurrence and typology of literary code-switching, lexical borrowings and all transferred discourse strategies (Kachru, 2015 [1986]) present in the novel focusing on the cultural and (socio)linguistic consequences of using them in an ‘Expanding literature’ as the Egyptian-English one.