Abstract
During the first two decades of the 21st century an increasing amount of narratives termed as Arabic dystopian fiction appeared on the Arabic literary scene, with a greater part authored by Egyptian writers. However, what characterises/marks a work as a dystopia? This paper investigates the dystopian nature of a selection of Egyptian literary works within the frame of the dystopian narrative tradition. The article begins by introducing the features of the traditional literary dystopias as they will be used in the analysis. It then gives a brief overview of the development of the genre in the Arabic literature. The discussion that follows highlights common elements and identifies specific themes in six Egyptian novels selected for the analysis, thereby highlighting differences and similarities between them and the traditional Western dystopias. The article calls for a categorisation of Arabic dystopian narrative that takes into consideration social, political, historical and cultural factors specific for the Arabic in general, and Egyptian in particular, literary field. 
 Keywords: Arabic literature, dystopia, dystopian literature, contemporary literature, Egypt, fiction, speculative fiction.
Highlights
During the first two decades of the 21st century, an increasing amount of narrative defined as Arabic dystopian fiction appeared on the Arabic literary scene (BAKKER 2018)
The aim of this paper is to investigate the dystopian nature of a selection of 21st century Egyptian works
4.1 Types, themes and trends Within the frame of CLAEYS’ categorisation of dystopian narrative, the first variation was types of stories set in difficult places that dealt with fear of punishment
Summary
During the first two decades of the 21st century, an increasing amount of narrative defined as Arabic dystopian fiction appeared on the Arabic literary scene (BAKKER 2018). Several novels and short stories, termed as dystopias in newspaper articles, on the Web and in blogs, 1 were published throughout the Arab world. This phenomenon deserves some attention, as Arabic fiction has so far seldom made use of dystopian fiction as a form of social or political criticism—authors have usually opted for other devices, such as realism (ALLEN 1995: 65), symbolism and surrealism. Barbara Bakker greater part of this dystopian fiction of the Arab world was written by Egyptian authors (JACQUEMOND 2016: 366). Because of this reason, this paper focuses on Egyptian works by Egyptian writers. The discussion that follows identifies common themes and elements specific for these works and raises a number of considerations about their nature as literary dystopias based on a traditional definition of dystopian literature, thereby highlighting the need of an Arabic and/or Egyptian characterisation of Arabic/Egyptian dystopian literature
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