The Yemeni novel has historically been difficult to define. Up to 1927, Yemeni literature consisted largely of poetry and short stories. Poetry and folk song poems in the south and north of Yemen greatly attracted attention of Yemeni and Arabic writers as well as readers, and many collections of poems were published. Due to factors ranging from the scarcity of publishing houses to their limited commercial capacity, however, the Yemeni novel took a relatively long time to establish itself. The Researcher Sabry Muslim proposes that Yemeni novels are actually unknown to the Arab reader and even to the Yemeni reader, noting that most Yemeni novelists write outside of Yemen. Similarly, the writer Ibrahim Abu Talib suggests that if we tried to count the number of Yemeni novels published before 2000, there are less than one hundred. Scholars also disagree on which novel is the first Yemeni novel. Although the Yemeni writer Ahmed Abdullah Al-Saqqaf published his novel Fatāt Qarut in 1927, critics including Hisham Ali, Amna Yusef, and Ibrahim Abu Talib, discount it in their studies or in articles because it was published outside Yemen. Instead, they believe that the novel, Said by Muhammad Ali Luqman, is the first Yemeni novel on the pretext that it was published in 1939 in Yemen. Indeed, many early twentieth-century works of literary history claim that Yemeni authors have no distinct tradition of the novel. Academics deny the existence of the novel in Yemen, to the point of claiming that Yemeni culture and style of life was not ready for the potential of fictional creation. The writer and critic Muhammad Nasser Sheraa agrees, writing that, “The genre of novelist creativity in Yemen has taken a modest path since its inception in the year 1939 until now, if we consider the novel Said by the Muhammad Ali Luqman as the beginning of the track.” Half a century later, it is clear that these ideas have been based on lack of research and rigorous thinking. This thesis takes a purposefully broad view of the Yemeni novel, reading three influential early novels by Yemeni writers working inside and outside Yemen to identify key features of the twentieth-century Yemeni novel. These novels, which I selected for their publication chronology, as well as their diversity topics and narrative techniques, are Fatāt Qarut (1927), Al-Rahīna (1984), and Al-Malika al-Maghdūra (1998). Previous studies such as Abdulhakim Baqees’s Fatāt Qarut and Pioneering the Marginalized Novel. Criticism of Society and the Relationship with the Other debate the Yemeni novel’s origins and focus on statistics about the number of published novels, the factors that contributed to their dissemination, and the topics discussed. By contrast, my thesis analyzes the novels themselves to show how authors deploy novelistic techniques to address key political, economic, and social developments in twentieth-century Yemeni life. Additionally, this thesis highlights the diversity of Yemeni novels by examining how their content and narrative structure develop during the Twentieth Century.
