The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature.

• Author: DeYoung, Terri

With this volume, Sabry Hafez, a noted literary critic in the Arab world and currently lecturer in Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), has produced a substantial and serious work containing important information for anyone interested in the development of modern Arabic prose narrative, and especially the short story. It is particularly welcome as a source for those who lack knowledge of Arabic, because it makes a large amount of scattered and often difficult-to-retrieve historical data available in a conveniently compact and readable form. This historical research includes considerable material about the development of narrative in the Levant (and to a lesser extent Iraq), an area that is usually neglected in the standard Arabic histories of modern prose, which tend to confine themselves to the much richer tradition that developed in Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The considerably wider perspective that Professor Hafez adopts allows him to make fresh observations and suggest new perspectives about subjects that would seem to have already been thoroughly covered by earlier writers on the topic. For example, from the standpoint of Western influences on developments in modern Arab narrative, he is able to argue convincingly the importance of the often neglected influence of Russian literature on early writers from Ottoman Syria, like Mikhail Nuayma and Abd al-Masih Haddad - who in turn had an impact on later Egyptian authors - alongside the much better documented French influence so prevalent in Egypt as well as Syria beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

The book has the additional advantage of demonstrating, through the close reading of Mahmud Tahir Lashin's short story, "Hadith al-Qarya" (Village Small Talk), that comprises its final chapter, what can be exciting and compelling about the study of this literature, one whose works are all too often neglected in the West. It is in this chapter that Professor Hafez' ability to synthesize different modern Western critical theories of narrative, and to apply them with sensitivity and sensibility to the Arabic literary tradition, shines most impressively, an accomplishment aided by the fact that he has made available to us in Lashin's story a truly striking masterpiece in miniature of the storyteller's art.

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