INTRODUCTION

A regular perusal of book review periodicals such as those published in London and New York provides confirmation of the fact that biography has become a popular, perhaps the most popular, genre among what is often termed the general reading public. The arts of inclusion and omission have ensured that the existence of several biographies of the same prominent personage and the widely divergent pictures that they manage to create provide ready corroboration of our increasing awareness of the linkages between biography and fictional genres. Most particularly, recent research on the fascinating genre of autobiography, that ultimate act of self-arrogation, has served to identify unequivocally the intimate connections between that literary activity and fiction. Varieties of writing in such topics as history, biography, travel, as well as fiction, all come to be viewed as types of ‘narrative’, thereby sharing a number of structural and aesthetic features but differentiated by the contract that they establish with the reader, that contract itself being subject to varieties of manipulation by the author.

This immensely creative variety of modes whereby generic categories have been and are being blurred serves as an excellent preliminary to this chapter in which we will explore literary works in Arabic which fit within the terms of reference identified by Leder and Kilpatrick: ‘works principally in prose, in which there is a pervasive concern with artistic expression as well as the communication of information’ (Journal of Arabic Literature 23/1 (March, 1992): 2).