| This interdisciplinary study explores how Driss Chraibi's L'Homme du Livre (1995), Assia Djebar's Loin de Medine (1991), and Anissa Boumediene's La fin d'un monde (1991) present accounts of particular historical moments in early Islam. This study explores the role of the imagination as well as freedom of invention when reconstructing historical events. It engages the novels through a study of the interplay between the literary text and the sources and traditions that impact and shape the text narrative. Gaining direct access to the original sources in Arabic serves to analyze how religious and early historical materials are considered in and reflected by the fictional texts. Because the sources tend to differ in both content and approach, this study examines their preoccupations in order to determine the criteria of selection applied by each novelist. |
