Crime Fiction has been very popular among Europeans and Americans since the nineteenth century.
However, the situation in the Arab world is not the same, and the intrigue and suspense known to the
genre fail to engage Arab writers and readers. Critics have dedicated little attention to find out why the
lack of appetite to write or read crime fiction in this part of the world, despite the abundance of Arabic
translations of Victorian and classic crime novels. Employing both the comparative and historicism
approaches, the paper aims to unravel the reasons behind Arab writers and readers? disinterest in the
genre. It seems that the matter is not unrelated to culture, political, social, educational, and philosophical
reasons, which indicates even deeper distinctions between east and west. This paper can be a small part
of a bigger body of self-suggesting research, part of which is to explore the recent rise of noir, hardboiled
novels, and film in Arabic literature, which comes in correspondence to the bloody unrest in the region
since the “Arab Spring”. Such is among several literary phenomena calling for further research and
deeper investigation.
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Author Name: Tahani Alghureiby
URL: View PDF
Keywords: Arabic Literature, Arabic Noir, Comparative Literature, Crime Fiction, Detective Fiction
ISSN:
EISSN: 2229-9327
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