This paper takes off from the premise that the literary canon of Nahḍa has been beholden to a cartographic imaginary that reads literary form as a site indexing the encounter between Europe and its others. This limited geographic compartmentalization has undermined our ability to read literary form as a site for the practice, and production, of conceptions of the literary. This paper returns to the usual suspects of 19th century literature in Arabic to examine questions of formal coherence and narrative epistemology beyond the cartographic imaginary of modernity. Following the threads of the conception of the imagination as “spectrality” (khayāl) across instances from this canon, the paper argues that far from being a fragmented form, mixing traditional and modern, Arabic and European, literary form in Nahḍa is born out of arduous reckoning with modern political sovereignty. The insight allows us to implode the temporal assumptions underpinning canonicity which are another refraction of the cartographic imaginary. In so doing, a new horizon for serious comparison is opened up.