The dispossession and removal of three-quarter of a million Palestinians during the Nakba of 1947-9 dismembered Palestinian society and robbed it of the geographic integrity it once enjoyed. This event destabilized past narratives of Palestinian nationalism and spelled the demise of pre-1948 elites. Exile, therefore, opened the intellectual field to new national imaginaries and literary experimentations. Through a survey of Palestinian reflections on exile as they appeared in Beirut’s cultural journals and periodicals, I analyze how literary traditions fashion the national-self and how a Palestinian nation was written. This wave of literature spans the two decades separating Nakba from Naksa, the so-called lost years of Palestinian history (1948-67). To make better sense of the relation between nation and writing, I take literary criticism as the object of my study and examine how Beirut-based Palestinian intellectuals advocated for certain forms of writing to achieve national liberation as opposed to others. In 1953, the inaugural issue of al-Adab – one of the Arab World’s foremost literary and cultural journals – stated that literary criticism presented a medium through which Arab writers can engage in and contribute to global debates on literature and politics and that as a tradition it would receive “utmost care” within the journal’s pages. Despite such statements, intellectual histories of the Middle East have yet to produce a study focusing on literary criticism, its debates, and its contributors. This paper fills this gap by examining the literary theories and criticism posed by Palestinian writers over the 1950s and 1960s. It will connect the critical writings of Ghassan Kanafani, Fadwa Touqan, Samira ‘Azzam, Ihsan ‘Abbas, Jabra I. Jabra, Issa Boullata, and Tawfiq Sayigh against a Beiruti intellectual backdrop, which featured the likes of Suhail and ‘Aida Idriss, Khalida Said, Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, Laila Baalbaki, Unsi al-Hajj, Hussein Mruwwah, and Raeef Khuri. From Beirut, Palestinian writers innovated styles inspired by their experience of exile at the same time as they attempted to resolve its contradictions and alienating effects. In linking movements in literary criticism and Palestinian intellectual history to processes of nation-making and nation-writing after 1948, the paper will close with a discussion of Edward Said that situates him in his Palestinian genealogy. Here, I maintain that Said’s notion of literature as “hopelessly involved in politics” builds upon a rich Palestinian literary tradition that preceded him which interrogated exile by redefining the relationship between the national and the literary.