1950 – 1960
Many Arab-majority countries became independent in decades following the World War II. Nevertheless, they were still trying to deal with the trauma of being colonized. The optimism that resulted from the revolutionary fervour and the many nations achieving independence in had resulted in the literary strand of social realism. The appearance of this strand was associated with the Marxist ideology, as many of its advocates were Marxists writers under the influence of Soviet thought and literature. This type of writing conceived the development of society as a revolutionary class struggle and the writer as the one who witnesses, documents, and criticises that march forward of society. The social realist strand was therefore seen as an expression of the commitment of the writer to the political and social developments of its society, a phenomenon that would later be termed Iltizām (see in 1953: Iltizām).
In North Africa, for example, writers’ social commitment “reflected the symbiosis of modern creative writing and contemporary historical events”( William Granara. 2003. “North African Literature in Arabic”, in Encyclopaedia of African Literature. eds. Simon Gikandi, Routledge: New York, p. 527). The bitterness of the anti-colonial struggle and the failure of the postcolonial phase to improve living conditions, in addition to oppressive censorship, where themes that provided a subtext for many of the literary works. The Generation of ’52 group of Maghrebi novelists, which include Albert Memmi, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri, Mohamed Dic, Yacine Kateb, Ahmed Sefrioui, and Driss Chraïbi, developed Francophone literature as an instrument to express the new identity of emergent nations, and in their works often used ethnographic details that document the young adulthood of a protagonist as similar to that of the author’s. The use of the French language led to its own issues, such as that of testifying against the injustices of colonialism in the oppressor’s own language.
The period of the late 1950s and the 1960s saw an increased tendency for literature to focus on the individual and his social environment. Whereas the literature from the 1940s onward had focused on the problems of society, literature moved to using the conscience of the individual through using the techniques of modern psychology written through stream-of-consciousness and interior monologues.
(see for more: Roger Allen. 1994. The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Syracus University Press: New York)