This dissertation investigates the quietly spectacular, particular moment of an inconspicuous Palestinian publication from 1999 entitled D&dotbelow;uyūf al-nār al-dā`imūna [The Eternal Guests of Fire; EGF]. A poetry anthology, EGF sparked an immediate debate among commentators, who quickly announced the emergence of the New Palestinian Poets.

My study explores the New Poets as a literary trend and outlines their poetic and meta-poetic visions. It also examines the poetological and ideological agendas that emerge from the critical reception—or "rewriting" in André Lefevere's terms—of EGF. While critics widely perceive the production of the New Poets to signal rupture with a poetic history dominated by overtly political and nationalistic writing, many of the poems themselves resist such depoliticized readings that dove-tail too conveniently with official and semi-official peace process discourses. Destabilizing the common binary opposition between personal-aesthetic and political-national expression, the New Poets produce poetic categories with multiple, ambiguous, and even contradictory valences.

One example of such poetic resistance is found in Ghada al-Shafi`i's work, which interrogates gendered subjectivity and women's marginalization both within Palestinian cultural production and Western feminist discourse. My reading of al-Shafi`i engages a Palestinian woman's experimental poetry as a site of language and politics both. Implicitly it also considers how poetry, in ways unique to it, seeks to address or redress linguistic and political inequities.

Another example of poetic resistance appears in the New Poets' intertextual engagement with Mahmoud Darwish, which suggests an allusive practice where inter-Palestinian affiliation is flaunted. Such a practice may aptly be called a "political intertextuality" that draws attention to the writer and reader as social, nationalized subjects.

I offer my readings of the New Poets—the texts themselves and their rewriting—as an emblematic site for the larger construction of cultural politics in Palestine at the turn of the 21^st century. Mapping the stakes of the creation of a new literary trend enhances our understanding of contemporary Palestinian poetry and of those vital negotiations of identity and borders in a post-Oslo, still-colonial context conducted not between political leaderships, but between writers, critics, and their audiences.