Critics’ Reception of Women’s Novels in Saudi Arabia

This paper examines how male critics in Saudi Arabia received the pre-1980 works of Saudi female novelists in their critical studies. It seeks to explain why many Saudi and Arab male literary critics either ignored or decried these pioneering novels by highlighting the essential criteria they adopted in their evaluation and criticism of such texts. This paper establishes that these novels were poorly received—and unjustly so—compared to those written by men in the same period. Male critics subconsciously dismissed or disregarded these novels on the grounds that they were of limited literary quality, did not belong to what was accepted as the Saudi social and cultural environment, or did not represent the reality of Saudi women’s lives. Many Saudi male novelists would have been characterized as having no artistic value or failing to represent the Saudi social reality had these same core evaluative criteria been adopted in the criticism of their early works. KEYWORDS Cultural criticism; gender bias; Saudi environment; Saudi literature; Saudi novel; women’s writing