Writing the Self and the Other

The literature of the 'contact zone' has been approached in literary criticism quite a lot, but this book is concerned with the narrative style of Arab, Women, postcolonial writers, selecting Leila Aboulela's The Translator and Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love as a case study. It analyses the East-West encounter in the two narratives using a feminist, postcolonial, literary, linguistic approach. The study employs the analysis of characterisation in terms of voice(s) and viewpoint as analytical linguistic framework. The study concludes that though objectivity is a pointless aim, it is attempted by both novelists in two different styles. The two novels employ different voices in their representation, whether in representing the oriental Self or the occidental Other. Although the novelists differ in their narrative style, they share the aim of reforming the deformed image of the Orient to which they belong.