Note on Transliteration and Translation Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Literary Empathy in the World-System: A Historical Materialist Framework 1. Literary Empathy, Literary Enclosure Across the Middle Eastern World-System 2. Empathy as Mediator of Class-based (Non-)Sight in Ghassan Kanafani's Kuwaiti Map of Dreams 3. Identification, Recognition, and the Palestinian City: Literary Empathy as Class Formation/Contestation in Post-Oslo Palestinian Writing 4. Facing the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the Hebrew Literary Imaginary 5. The Trackless Desert Between Exuberance and Catastrophe in Bothayna Al-Essa's Lost in Mecca and Abdulrahman Munif's Cities of Salt Postscript: On Literary Empathy and Social Totality Works Cited Index.