An Approach to the Theory of the Novel

Abstract

There is a consensus that the novel is a purely western art in origin. Like all other literary genres, the novel also went through various stages of development before it became, especially in the bourgeois stage, the undisputable epic of the modern age. Since then, the novel took various forms-a fact that led to a diversity in the opinions of its critics, theorists, and historians regarding its origins and the date of its birth. As novelistic forms varied, especially since the middle of the twentieth century, the concept of the novel became more problematic and ambiguous. There is, for instance, a difference between the Realist Novel (be it critical, documentary, or socialist) and the New Novel (Alain Robbe-Grillet, James Joyce, Marcel Proust). There is also a difference between these two forms and the Magic-Realist novel produced by Latin American writers. This diversity of opinions regarding the origins and concept of the novellas practiced by its writers-serves as an impetus to sift through these opinions in order to deduce the commonalities among the texts called “novels” by their practitioners. In order to find out what these commonalities are, this paper focuses mainly on the opinions of those historians, theorists, and writers of novels who spoke about their creative experiences. This paper derives its legitimacy from our conviction that the Arabic novel is part of world fiction, a fact that makes the diversity in Arabic fictional forms, however idiosyncratically Arabic, nothing more than a testimony to the acculturation between Arab novelists and world fictional production.