7 - Reception: Stream of Consciousness

Summary

And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it.

– Virginia Woolf

1. INTRODUCTION

There is a good deal of research on the formative stage of modern Arabic literature, mostly the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Arab world set about creating responses to the growing impact and domination, political as well as cultural, of the West. Most of the studies are in both Arabic and English, but one can find as well comprehensive studies in other languages, such as German, French, and Spanish. It was during the late nineteenth century that Western literary forms, such as the novel and the short story, were “borrowed” by Arabic literature, though I have shown in several studies that this “import” was by no means a pure import because Arab culture had had approximately the same genres or similar ones in their own local versions. Unlike poetry, which parted ways only gradually with traditional “sacred” norms, the development of fiction has faced no major obstacles. Within less than one century, traditional canonical prose genres, such as the maqāma and risāla, totally disappeared from the Arabic literary system, and ever since the short story and the novel have become the leading prose genres. Together with other classical genres, both the maqāma and risāla played a role in the development of the new prose genres, but the exact nature of that role is still a matter of dispute. What is clear is that the new genres developed quickly thanks to the popularity of non-canonical narrative literature, with Alf Layla wa-Layla, Siyar al-Anbiyā’, and the various epics of ‘Antara, Baybars, and Banū Hilāl all paving the way for the modern narrative genres. The spread of novels translated into Arabic and original Arabic works of popular fiction during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century was a necessary stage in the development of the novel as a canonical genre. Much has already been written about the development of Arabic narrative discourse, and the short story and the novel in particular, and there are a number of studies on the changing norms in dialogue and narration.