The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were pivotal in contemporary Egyptian history. The country searched for an identity in the face of intensifying western imperialism, the emerging nation-state, changing gender roles, and a rising middle class. A new cultural conception of childhood emerged in Egypt that had a synergistic and synonymous relationship with this process of modernization. Modernization cannot be separated from reconceptualization of categories of age. This book examines the transformations of Egyptian childhoods that occurred across gender, class, and rural/urban divides. It also questions the role of nostalgia and representation of childhood in illuminating key underlying political, social, and cultural developments in Egypt. The book uses unexplored Arabic sources such as the children's press and literature; as well as more familiar Arabic sources, such as autobiographies and the writings of Egyptian intellectuals – whose discussion of childhood has been so far ignored.
