Narrative Structure and the Representation of History in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies: A New Historicist Approach

Abstract

In his article, “Professing the Renaissance,” Louis A. Montrose advocates the idea of “the textuality of history and the historicity of the text” (20). According to Montrose’s idea, the literary text has a certain social, political, historical and cultural context and the textuality of history focuses on providing a representation of history or history as a narrative reflecting the ideology of its time. New Historicism as a critical approach highlights the interlinking relationship between history and literature and how the narrative structure with its elements of plot, point of view, themes and setting represent history and demonstrate the textuality or fictionality of the text. In other words, the New Historicist literary approach explores the dialogue between history and literature. This research attempts a New historicist approach to Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015). The Kindness of Enemies is Aboulela’s recent novel. The novel can be regarded as a historical chronicle of the Russian invasion and Islamic Jihad in the Caucasus in the 19th century as contradictory to present day terrorism. The Kindness of Enemies is a framed story as it has two plot narratives that weave the present and the past in a dramatic way that reflects Aboulela’s innovation with the narrative structure as a means of representing and interpreting history. Investigated from a New Historicist approach, The Kindness of Enemies is a novel which presents a crucial period of history through depicting factual historical characters as well as juxtaposing them with fictional characters in a way that shows the novel as a product of historical, social cultural and biographical factors.