The events of July 1952 render problematic any attempt to classify the case of Nasser’s “revolution” in Egypt in terms of a clear social-scientific typology. The cadre of military officers who seized power with a display of force on 23 July 1952 initially handed the reins over to the remnants of the liberal-constitutional regime and waited in the wings while dissension spread across the country and within their own ranks. It was 8 September when the officers asserted their political will; purging all political parties, forming their own centralized organization for governmental administration, and announcing their plans for Land Reform. This latter policy became the keystone in an emergent political ideology that allowed for the seizure of power by Nasser and the “Free Officers” to be coded as a “revolution.” Scholars of the political economy of modern Egypt in the West have largely imported this characterization wholesale. In the political vacuum left by revolution, why would the Free Officers seize on Agrarian Reform as the ideological foundation upon which to build a unified political society in Egypt? How could claims to assist and uplift the peasantry also be read as claims to represent the Egyptian nation? This paper attempts to grapple with these questions via the theoretical contributions of Raymond Williams, who provides a framework for understanding the relationship between literature, ideology, and social history in The Country and the City (1973) and Marxism and Literature (1978). After briefly reviewing the history of the "rural imaginary" in Egyptian literature, this study will examine the “social realist” school of Egyptian literature prominent at the time of the revolution. A close reading of three texts--Al-’Ard (1954) by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Al-Jabal (1959) by Fathi Ghanim, and Al-Haram (1959) by Yusuf Idris--will elucidate the semiotic logic that associated the new regime with reform of the peasantry and the Egyptian people vis-à-vis the elided forces of the ancièn regime and the specter of colonialism. This study aims to fill the historiographic lacuna on the relationship between state and society during the initial formation of Nasser’s regime (1952-1956 in particular), and to refine methods for using literature and affectively-charged cultural artifacts as sources for the social history of Egypt.