Rethinking the critical reception by male critics in Saudi Arabia of Saudi women’s pre-1980 novels

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines how the pre-1980 works of Saudi female novelists were received by male critics in Saudi Arabia in their critical studies. It seeks to explain why many Saudi and Arab male literary critics either ignored or decried these pioneering novels, by highlighting the essential criteria they adopted in their evaluation and criticism of such texts. The paper determines that these novels were poorly received—and unjustly so—in comparison with those written by men in the same period, male critics having subconsciously dismissed or disregarded them on the grounds that they were of limited literary quality, did not belong to what was accepted as the Saudi social and cultural environment, or did not represent the reality of Saudi women’s lives. Had these core evaluative criteria been adopted in criticism of the early novels of Saudi men, many of these would also have been excluded as having no artistic value or as failing to represent Saudi social reality.