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Throughout the last three decades, the Arab region has attracted the unwanted attention of the rest of the world because of its spiralling political upheaval. This unrest has caused migration, economic and cultural changes, and eventually a spring of revolutions and protests in demand of reform. Arab countries are now in the spotlight of global current affairs, and all the imperfections regarding their cultural, social, and gender inequalities have surfaced to the foreground. Arab women novelists have been addressing feminist issues for centuries, chipping away at the stereotypical image of the meek and voiceless Arab woman that comes hand in hand with Orientalism. Through their fiction, writers such as Nawal El Saadawi, Hanan Al- Shaykh and Fadia Faqir have promulgated a bold brand of Arab feminist thought. This interdisciplinary thesis explores the Greater Syrian and Egyptian woman's novel written between 1975 and 2007. Through the in-depth analysis of Arab women's novels available in English, I attempt to uncover the many reasons behind today's gender inequality in Greater Syria and Egypt. By examining contemporary Arabic narrative styles and cultivating traditional Arab story-telling methods, the creative element of this thesis uses fiction to expose social and political injustice. The novel within this thesis challenges different forms of patriarchy that are dominant in the region, and endeavours to document a historical, on-going revolution.

This dissertation explores the representative works of several contemporary Iraqi women’s writing and the themes of war and exile employed in their narratives. Iraqi women focus their fictional narrative discourse and themes on the Iraqi war(s) and the political situation their nation faced over the past thirty years. The writers chosen for this study are a mere representation of the many Iraqi writers who focus their efforts and their writings on the war story. I argue that the themes of war and exile, and the historical and pragmatic vein that they write from, have come to dominate the discourse of Iraqi women. It has become the focal point of their themes which has come to serve as their national narrative. The framework Iraqi women articulate, this national narrative, is an embodiment of the violence they witness in their quotidian life in war and exile. They write this experience from a feminist impulse as well as through a maternal instinct to articulate the voice of the voiceless subaltern members of their society. They depict their national war story through the sub-narratives of the tumultuous experience of Iraqis. Women novelists, through their powerful depiction of the reality Iraqis experience, deliver a significant and necessary voice to their contemporary national narrative of war.