Doctoral thesis based on a corpus of thirty novelists or short story writers - including six women - and about one hundred and twenty novels and collections of short stories, The character of the woman in the novel and the short story in Egypt from 1914 to 1960 draws its guiding thread the following observation: the concepts of "novel" and "woman" are, so to speak, discoveries altogether new in Egypt of the XX th century, the traditions, whether political, moral or literary begin to be shaken by contact with Europe. Thus, Charles Vial maintains that the problem of the condition of women did not arise in Egypt from “within”, at a particular stage of its social evolution. It was imposed on him by his confrontation with the West in modern times. Starting from this axiom, it dialectically unfolds the evolution of female characters in Egyptian fictions, from their oppression to their liberation and their sublimation, which the author nevertheless intends to put into perspective. Far from promoting any kind of sexual fulfilment or social responsibility, writers prefer to free their character from “truly feminine” virtues. Some of them even detect in women dispositions for tyranny which they compare to the famous "feminine cunning" and they add to it a mysterious tendency to harm. There is a resurgence of long-held, old beliefs here, but perhaps also the more modern fear of a |