The Narrative Structure of Contemporary Arab Women’s Travel Discourse: An Analytical Study

Abstract

This study examines the narrative structure in contemporary Arab women's travel writing as a modern narrative discourse that emerged within the framework of the cultural and intellectual transformations witnessed by contemporary Arabic literature. The study is based on the assumption that women’s travel writing has transcended the traditional function based on spatial description and external documentation, becoming instead a narrative experience in which the self intertwines with place, objective time with psychological time, and external experience with internal reflection. The study adopts the descriptive-analytical approach, drawing on concepts from modern narratology such as narrative structure, narrator, narrative perspective, and time, through the analysis of selected models from contemporary Arab women’s travel texts. The study reveals the dominance of the first-person subjective narrator, the breaking of linear chronology, the employment of psychological time, and the transformation of place into a semantic element reflecting the self’s consciousness and its psychological and cultural transformations. The findings also demonstrate that the structure of events in women’s travel writing is characterized by fragmentation and discontinuity, relying on relatively independent narrative segments, which reflects the dominance of memory and emotion in the construction of narrative discourse. The study concludes that Arab women’s travel writing has contributed to renewing Arabic travel narrative and deepening its psychological and contemplative dimensions. It further recommends directing future studies toward analyzing narrative language and expressive styles in Arab women’s travel writing in order to reveal its aesthetic specificity and its impact on the development of contemporary travel discourse.