If Lebanon in early 2015 is post-war, (or more cynically interwar), then why has writing about Lebanese literature taken so long to catch up? Lebanese writing of and about the Civil War has been analyzed, translated, anthologized and canonized. The war is cast by authors and critics as generative of Lebanese literary modernism, and "Lebanese literature" is metonymically a Civil War literature. As the novelist and critic Elias Khoury has commented, "The Lebanese novel is the most experimental novel in the Arab world, and this has to do with the experience of the civil war." The Civil War--in either its representation, its augury, or its absence--has become part of the Lebanese literary contract. Without the war, in other words, ma fi shi. This panel will bring together scholars studying Lebanese writing from different periods to interrogate what sorts of alternate frames of reference we can bring to the study of the Arabic literature of Lebanon--through discussion of alternative literary genealogies, the post-war aesthetics of the quotidian, emergent sexualities, and the persistence of narratives of estrangement. One paper will argue for an alternative origin for Lebanese narrative modernism, by discussing the recasting of the Mount Lebanon village topos in the 1960s and 1970s works of Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar and Ilyas al-Dayri. A second paper will offer a discussion of the post-War recasting of Beirut as a space of everyday life in the novels of younger authors—such as Rabee Jaber, Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman. Offering a comparative analysis of Rashid al-Daif’s and Alexandra Chreiteh’s works, another paper argues that the contemporary Lebanese novel, in its exploration of evolving notions of Lebanese womanhood and manhood, gives voice to emergent subjectivities that are no longer subdued by previously dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. The final paper will explore the literary treatments of estrangement in wartime and postwar Lebanon through a comparative reading of two Arabic novels by Elias Khoury and Ghada Samman. As the War becomes more distant historically and our reliance upon it as the critical countertext recedes, this panel will serve to engage some of the new directions being taken by research into Arabophone Lebanese narratives. If Lebanon in early 2015 is post-war, (or more cynically interwar), then why has writing about Lebanese literature taken so long to catch up? Lebanese writing of and about the Civil War has been analyzed, translated, anthologized and canonized. The war is cast by authors and critics as generative of Lebanese literary modernism, and "Lebanese literature" is metonymically a Civil War literature. As the novelist and critic Elias Khoury has commented, "The Lebanese novel is the most experimental novel in the Arab world, and this has to do with the experience of the civil war." The Civil War--in either its representation, its augury, or its absence--has become part of the Lebanese literary contract. Without the war, in other words, ma fi shi. This panel will bring together scholars studying Lebanese writing from different periods to interrogate what sorts of alternate frames of reference we can bring to the study of the Arabic literature of Lebanon--through discussion of alternative literary genealogies, the post-war aesthetics of the quotidian, emergent sexualities, and the persistence of narratives of estrangement. One paper will argue for an alternative origin for Lebanese narrative modernism, by discussing the recasting of the Mount Lebanon village topos in the 1960s and 1970s works of Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar and Ilyas al-Dayri. A second paper will offer a discussion of the post-War recasting of Beirut as a space of everyday life in the novels of younger authors—such as Rabee Jaber, Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman. Offering a comparative analysis of Rashid al-Daif’s and Alexandra Chreiteh’s works, another paper argues that the contemporary Lebanese novel, in its exploration of evolving notions of Lebanese womanhood and manhood, gives voice to emergent subjectivities that are no longer subdued by previously dominant discourses of disavowal and exclusion. The final paper will explore the literary treatments of estrangement in wartime and postwar Lebanon through a comparative reading of two Arabic novels by Elias Khoury and Ghada Samman. As the War becomes more distant historically and our reliance upon it as the critical countertext recedes, this panel will serve to engage some of the new directions being taken by research into Arabophone Lebanese narratives.