The author uses translation as a critical category with which to question normative European models of literary history. Literary history, she argues, is a powerful instrument enlisted by the nation state in its attempt to claim legitimacy and authenticity, and as such partakes of and contributes to the various political and discursive practices that have shaped the relationship between Europe and its others in modernity. The author outlines an alternative model of the practice of writing (and reading) outside of the dominant nineteenth-century Romantic tradition by foregrounding translation as a key process in the creation and diffusion of texts, genres and literary schools. She does so by examining an Arabic translation published in Cairo in 1906 of Pharos the Egyptian, a bestselling Edwardian novel about ancient Egypt, situating the novel in both its British and local contexts in order to show how the conservative discourse of degeneration in Edwardian Britain both overlapped and collided with nationalist, reformist discourses in turn-of-the-century Egypt. Rather than focus on colonial difference and rigid dichotomies, she explores the community of social interests across the imperial divide, and in so doing offers us a glimpse into the ambivalent representations that lie at the heart of literary histories and that continue to structure the way we think about cultural identities.