Letter Discourse in Narrative text A Reading of Taha Hussain’s Novel “Adib”

Abstract

This research work attempts to shed light on the fictional experience of Taha Hussain and its position in the path of early Arabic novels through studying one of his famous novels entitled “Adib”. It starts by tackling the issue of identifying the genre of this narrative text written by Taha Hussein which is a matter of dispute among researchers. They sometimes attribute it to be autobiographical or biographical, influenced by what the author has declared in some press interviews. Then, the research deals, through analyzing the narrative structure of the text, with highlighting a textual phenomenon that some researchers overlooked as phenomenon, or overlooked its importance and effect on this structure. This phenomenon is exchanging letters between the characters in the novel. Therefore, the research aims at identifying the place of the letters, the ways in which they are incorporated into the novel, their effect, and the degree of harmony between letter discourse and the incubating narrative discourse.