Crime and Punishment Between Dickens and Naguib Mahfouz

About this book

Hend Shaaban Al-Sayed places Charles Dickens and Naguib Mahfouz in a comparative conversation about crime, poverty, and punishment. Victorian London and modern Cairo differ in history and social structure, yet both writers reveal how hunger, exclusion, family breakdown, and unequal institutions can narrow the choices available to the vulnerable. The study examines criminals not as abstract villains but as characters formed within moral and material environments. Narrative technique, social criticism, and ideas of justice are considered across selected works. By reading English and Arabic traditions together, the book asks whether punishment can be just when society refuses to confront the conditions that repeatedly produce the offense.