Introduction

Summary

Without fear of exaggeration, one could say that the changes that Arabic lit-erature has seen since the mid-nineteenth century are as momentous or even radical as the ways in which Arabic literature had been transformed following the rise of Islam in the seventh century. These changes have been accompanied by a dramatic increase in readership, first, throughout the Arab world and, second, since the mid-twentieth century, throughout the entire globe. With regard to the latter case, the writing and publishing of contemporary Arabic literature, in the original as well as in translation, have taken flight, as has the concomitant increase in literary consumption by Arab and foreign reading publics. Arabic literature has become such a huge field; the number of literary texts produced in recent decades is so enormous that they cannot be covered in any meaningful way by any traditional scholarly tool. This is why it is our duty as scholars of this literature to constantly revise the way we approach our material, which has not only grown quantitatively but qualitatively as well, as can be seen by its readers. Referring to the need to rewrite the literary history of the Arabic novel, Roger Allen (b. 1942), the most experienced contemporary scholar of modern Arabic literature, proclaims—in the words of the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)—that “the one duty that we owe to history is to rewrite it.” Allen then adds the following:

I wish to challenge many of the premises and organizing principles that have governed research and publication that I have done previously, not so much in order to suggest that they were not relevant or even useful for their time, but rather that the changing nature of Arabic fiction—a primary facet of its very essence, of course—requires a continuingly [sic] changing perspective in order to reflect both the creativity of Arab littérateurs and the kind of studies now being devoted to it.

Given the recent expansion of Arabic literary texts and the need to change our perspective on their study, I have proposed a shift in approach, that is, a new theoretical framework or model that would make possible the comprehensive study of the diverse and multifarious texts that make up Arabic literature.