The article consistently examines the phonetic, grammatical and lexical features of Omani Arabic as a dialect strongly contrasting the literary variant ( al-fuṣḥā ) compared to other dialects of the Arabian Peninsula. For the first time the authors propose a thesis that the basic factors of Omani Arabic formation were associated with the key historical events that occurred in this part of the Arabic world in the last centuries - from the settlement of the genuine Arabic tribes in the Arabian Peninsula to migration waves to Oman from the Asian region. The authors show the uniqueness of Omani Arabic, which easily assimilates lexical units borrowed from the non-European languages and emphasize the relevance and incompleteness of this process.
The study is devoted to the peculiarities of the development of the Arabic historical novel, the consistent transformation and “erosion” of its canons within the framework of the literary trends of the 20th and 21st centuries. The relevance of the topic, on the one hand, is due to the fact that the historical novel has not lost its significance in Arabic national literature. The share of works of this genre is still high, they occupy the first lines in the distribution of literary prizes. On the other hand, against the background of the general process of globalization, it is interesting to trace the trajectory of the development of the genre in the so-called “lagging” literature, to which many researchers rank Arabic literature. Some works of the genre fell into the focus of both Arabic, Western, as well as domestic orientalist-literary critics and were subjected to deep comprehensive consideration. Today, however, the novels of recent decades also require analysis. The purpose of the study was not just to identify the works of Arab authors that have received wide recognition in recent years, but to fit them into the paradigm of the development of the historical genre and thereby determine its direction in the near future. To do this, the authors tried to compare classical historical novels with modern ones, characterizing their heroes, describing the periods in the history of the Arab world that Arab authors addressed and continue to address within the genre, determining the degree of epic, historical authenticity, etc., in modern examples of the genre. It was found out, that classical heroes with a standard set of heroic qualities that influence the course of history are replaced by thinkers, scientists, dervishes, ordinary observers, and critical epochs and specific historical events are replaced by troubles periods - before or after a catastrophe, major transformations. Conclusions were drawn about the historicity of Arabic literature back in the pre-Islamic era, the long-term preservation of the canons of the Early Middle Ages in the genre, the sharp transformation of the genre and the refusal from the canons under the influence of postmodernism that penetration into Arabic soil in the mid 1960s coincided with the military and social upheavals of the history of Arabs. The direction of the genre, which is pronounced today towards ethnoliterature, is emphasized.
The article is devoted to the developing of modernism in Arabic prose and the art of one of the most prominent figures of this trend - Edwar al-Kharrat (1926-2015). The end of the dominance of the classical novel exactly in the first half of the 20th century and the turn of the generation of the 60s to new artistic techniques is directly associated with the historical events of 1967 (Six-Day War). It is noted that one of the consequences of these events for literature was the change of discourse - from revival (an-Nahda) to defeat (an-Naksa). The artistic method of Edwar al-Kharrat is characterized in detail on the examples of his early story “Station” and the novel “Rama and the Dragon”, which was included in the top ten Arabic-language novels of all time by the Union of Arab Writers. The authors distinguish thematic blocks in the works of al-Kharrat: the eternal themes of love, life and suffering, which are passed through Hellenistic and Middle Eastern mythologies and Christian philosophy. Such techniques of al-Kharrat as playing with the chronotope, narration through the subjective perception, attention to sensations, replacing the plot with a description, using dichotomy - the opposition of male and female, Christianity and Islam etc. are highlighted. Also the authors stress the significance of al-Kharrat's theoretical works on literature, where the artistic method, defined by him as a “new sensibility” and opposed by critics to what was called “al-Mahfuzia”, is comprehended. The question is raised about the role of al-Kharrat in the history of the latest literature of the Arab countries, while the authors try to remove the contradiction that is seen in the inimitability of al-Kharrat and his simultaneous fundamental influence on subsequent generations of prose writers.
The article is devoted to the development of literature and, in general, the verbal culture of Oman from the early Middle Ages to the present day. For both objective and subjective reasons, the Omani national literature has not yet become an object of research by domestic specialists. However, the strengthening of all-round relations, including cultural, between our countries and the recognition of contemporary Omani writers by the international literary community necessitates such a study. The goal of the article was to highlight the main features that were inherent in the verbal work of Oman for centuries and for a long time constituted its originality, before Omani writers began to rapidly adopt the main creative tendencies of Europe. For this, as the most famous material, the work of the founder of the school of Omani poetry, the poet of the early XX century, Abu Muslim al-Bahlyani, was analyzed. Also the attempt to outline the rapid changes that have taken place in the literary environment of Oman over the past half century, and to answer the question of what caused the interest in the literature of the Gulf today was made. As part of the work was considered the novel Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harti, who received an international prize in 2019 and who today presents the women's prose of Oman, which simply did not exist in the recent past. The main conclusions that researchers come to are that Omani literature for a long time practically did not experience changes in its hermetic environment and acquired distinctive features, even if we talk only about the framework of the Arab world. And then, with the beginning of the Omani Renaissance, it made a sharp leap forward and began to be of interest due to the combination of contemporary artistic techniques and national colour, as in the work of Jokha al-Harti, whose last novel has been translated into two dozen languages.
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