Literary History and the Arabic Novel

Abstract

Within such an investigative framework year 1988 may be seen as a significant watershed, in that Egyptian novelist Najib Mahfuz (b. 1911) was announced as that year's winner of Nobel Prize in Literature (an event, incidentally, in which this journal and present writer were closely involved; see The Nobel Prizes in Literature 1967-1987: A Symposium, WLT 62:2 [Spring 1988], pp. 201-3). At time Mahfuz (often transliterated as Mahfouz in West) was hailed by Nobel Committee and by literary commentators as the Dickens of Cairo or the Balzac of