This article provides a general survey of Emirati literature—poetry, drama, the short story and novel—tracing the history of the development of these genres in the periods before and after the formation of the UAE federation in 1971. While the UAE has now become famous as the commercial and tourist hub of the contemporary Middle East, very little is known in the English speaking world about the country’s literary and cultural productions within the context of the wider modern Arabic literary tradition. The article constitutes a preliminary report of an on-going project on the topic in which I am arguing that, contrary to the general perception in academia (East and West), contemporary Emirati literature is not inferior to its counterparts in the Gulf and wider Arab region; and that Emirati women are as active as their male compatriots in literary production.Key words: Arabic, literature, Emirati, contemporary, history, criticism

Th is article examines the 1990-1991 Iraq-Kuwait war as a gendered conflict, and Kuwaiti women's varied reactions to the events of the war, as represented in Kuwaiti fiction. In a category of Kuwaiti war narratives-by both male and female writers-there are the stereotypical images and roles of women: they are portrayed as 'weak', 'passive' and 'submissive' mothers/wives/young girls, and as victims of sexual abuse and humiliations during the conflict. In another category, women's images and roles in the conflict are re-constructed. Relying on the information and insights derived from the fictional texts belonging to the second category, this article demonstrates that the Kuwaiti resistance movement was not solely male-dominated, but rather that Kuwaiti women also served as resistant activists.

This article comparatively examines the first four novels of Fawziyya Shuwaysh al-Sālim (b. 1949): al-Shams madhbūḥa wa-l-layl maḥbūs (1997), al-Nuwākhidha (1998), Muzūn (2000), Ḥajar ʿalā ḥajar (2003). I argue that these novels reflect not only the stages of the author’s career as a novelist but also of the transition of Kuwaiti women’s fiction from the conventional to the postmodern narrative technique and discourse. Al-Sālim’s first and second novels typically reproduce-albeit subversively-the dominant literary discourse and employ conventional narrative techniques. On the other hand, her millennial-third and fourth-novels signal the inception of the feminist-postmodernist novel in Kuwait; in varying degrees, both texts utilise present-day, globalised linguistic vulgarism and fragmented narrative techniques to explore feminist discourses bordering on female transcendence and self-determination.

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