Zayd Mutee Dammaj’s Approach to History in The Hostage

Abstract:

Abstract PDF

The study examines Dammaj’s The Hostage (1984), the most famous Yemeni novel, as a historical novel. The study aims to investigate the concept of history used by the writer in the novel and compare it to the concept of traditional approach and the concept of new historicism. The researcher used the analytical approach to show the complexity of The Hostage as a historically situated text, as a creation of the re-thinking, on the part of Dammaj of the concept of history. The natural integration of history and fiction makes Dammaj a natural historian, extracting and presenting a single kernel of meaning. With his narrative art, he is trying to manipulate a continuous parallel between contemporaniety and antiquity. The novel is an attempt by the present in the form of fiction to give a meaning to the past in the form of history. The study concludes that Dammaj was able to use a new approach to history which is his own and which puts him closer to new historicism of European decent.