This book provides an understanding of narrative techniques and structuralist concepts using illustrative examples. It considers knowledge of these techniques and concepts essential for mastering and practicing them, as well as for rejecting them. It unveils the secrets of narrative writing and its artistic play. It establishes acceptance of differences as a vision and stance. It highlights the importance of the living reference in generating narrative structure and clarifies, with examples, how this living reference can be transformed into a reference within the text. It offers an analytical reading model considering structure, and another for interpretive reading considering poetics. It aims to develop a literary critical methodology that shapes structuralism rather than being shaped by it.

Dr. Yumna Al Eid – Writer and literary critic. She earned a PhD in Islamic Studies from Sorbonne University, Paris, and worked in education and university teaching. She lectured at several universities (Tunisia, Yemen, Paris) and participated in literary and intellectual conferences and seminars in various Arab and Western countries. She received the Al Owais Cultural Foundation Award for 1992-1993 in the field of literary and critical research, along with several honorary certificates and shields. She wrote articles and studies for several Lebanese and Arab newspapers and magazines and had positions and opinions during the Lebanese war debates about the relationship between literature and politics. She is an active member and advisory member in several Arab cultural literary institutions and magazines, and has chaired and been a member of several judging panels, the most recent of which was the Booker Prize for Arabic Novel. Her recent research focuses on the relationship between the living reference and the narrativity of the Arabic novel.

Publishing house: Dar Al Farabi Publishing and Distribution
Number of Pages: 336
Year of publication: 2010