Assia Djebar, Les enfants du nouveau monde [Children of the New World]

Marie-Anne Visoi (University of Toronto)

Ed. by David Houston Jones, University of Exeter
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.1.1: North African Writing and Culture: Arabic, Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Lia Brozgal (University of California, Los Angeles), Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), Ziad Elmarsafy (King's College London), Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Dalia Mostafa (University of Manchester), Nora Parr (SOAS, University of London), Rita Sakr (Maynooth University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1962

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Assia Djebar’s novel

Les enfants du nouveau monde

[Children of the New World, 1962] has commonly been regarded as one of the few modern texts representing the Algerian space from a woman’s perspective. Djebar’s text moves beyond ideology and draws its readers in to new aesthetic forms of expressions where the Bakhtinian concept of a “multi-voiced discourse” is fundamental to the understanding of the novel.

The novel consists of nine chapters, named after the nine characters in the novel. An unusual narrative strategy, the placing of the characters’ names before the first chapter orients readers, in theatrical fashion, in the fictional world of the text. Also, it provides certain details regarding the relationships between characters in the novel, as well as a vague

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2334 words

Citation: Visoi, Marie-Anne. "Les enfants du nouveau monde". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 July 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=25873, accessed 24 April 2024.]

Save this article