Libyan short story

Abstract

The short story is the dominant literary genre in Libya. This thesis sets out to examine this field of literature as it developed over the last thirty years. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part consists of three introductory chapters. Chapter One deals with the cultural background during the Ottoman and Italian occupation; in Chapter Two the short story is briefly defined for the purposes of this study while Chapter Three offers a brief survey of the early developments in Libyan story-writing. Part Two is devoted to an analysis of the styles of the main writers and is divided into four chapters each dealing 0 with one of the four main approaches which have been characterised as the Emotional Approach (Chapter Four), the Tell-a-Tale Approach (Chapter Five), the Realistic Approach (Chapter Six) and the Analytical Approach (Chapter Seven). In Part Three some of the main social themes of the Libyan short story are examined in five chapters (Chapters Eight to Twelve). An attempt has been made to identify the characteristics of the Libyan short story, by way of a conclusion.