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Mārūn Al-Naqqāsh is often seen as the father of modern Arabic drama. He was born in Sidon, but grew up in Beirut. After a traditional education comprising detailed studies of Arabic language and literature as well as law and foreign languages Al-Naqqāsh decided to travel. His first journeys took him to Damascus and Aleppo, and then in 1846 he traveled to Egypt and Italy. In Italy he became fascinated with European theater and on his return to Beirut he decided to write and produce a play. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Arabic culture in addition to influences from his journeys, Al-Naqqāsh produced Al-bakhīl (The Miser, 1847).

‘Abd al Salām Al-‘Ujaylī was one of the most productive and versatile literary figures in twentieth-century Syria. His experiences both as a medical doctor and a politician fed into his fictional output, which is most often characterized as realist. Al-‘Ujaylī is considered one of the earliest writers of fiction in Syria. Among his over forty publications are novels, poetry collections, theater plays, travelogues, essays, and auto-biographies. His preferred genre, however, remained the short story.

Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world? These and related questions are, if not given a definite answer, explored in the chapters of this anthology. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders include studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the anthology as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demand a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks. The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West-african novels, border-crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.

Eyelight, in the eyes of a human portrayed on film, is a cinematographic means to augment the vividness of expressed emotions. This is used by both cinematographers and still photographers, and it is also expressed in Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, and Japanese literatures. Here, the effect of using eyelight in the cornea of the human eye on film is examined by eye-tracking individuals on a Swedish university campus, in order to study their perceptual responses to film characters with, or without, a glimpse of light in their eyes. The participants’ perceived capacity to discern the emotional states of the film characters was also tested. Eye-tracking data were analyzed for entry time, fixation time, dwell time, hit ratio, and revisitors, while emotional decoding was captured through a self-report survey and by open questions. Our results demonstrated that film viewers’ attention is captured 49% faster, and 11% less time is used per fixation to film characters’ eyes when eyelight is used. In addition, 58% of our participants claimed that emotions were easy to discern from eyes in the eyelight condition, whereas only 36% claimed that emotions were easy to discern under the no-eyelight condition. Although our results concern the subjective impression of one’s ability to discern the emotions of each film character, they offer preliminary support for the idea of using eyelight to enhance emotional communication in film and stills photography.