Arabic fiction by Palestinian writers in Israel underwent a rebirth with the establishment of the State in 1948 - an event affecting not only the land that had been Palestine, but the entire region. In The Quest for a Lost Identity, Mahmud Ghanayim probes in considerable detail this creative process over the last half-century. Adopting a strictly literary treatment of the new situation, he reconstructs the various stages in the evolution of Palestinian literature and its difficult existence under martial law. Perusing works by such writers as Hanna Ibrahim, Atallah Mansur, Muhammad ?Ali-...