Historical Representation and Feminist Critique in Novels by Women of the Arabian Gulf

In recent decades, historical representation has emerged as a prominent narrative strategy in novels authored by women in the Arabian Gulf. This article examines how these women engage with history not as a nostalgic return to the past, but as a critical and feminist mode of interrogating gendered exclusions, social hierarchies, and cultural memory. It analyzes the motivations underlying this historical turn and the narrative forms through which it is realized. Issues of gender inequality, patriarchal authority, class stratification, and women’s agency are brought into focus to demonstrate how these novels reconfigure historical experience in order to critique contemporary social realities. Using a corpus of contemporary Gulf women’s fiction, the study tracesthe evolving representation of women’s social conditions and examines how historical narratives articulate feminine resistance and self-formation.

class stratification · Cultural memory · Feminist criticism · Gender inequality · historical representation · Patriarchy · self-formation · women's agency · women's fiction · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies