Violence in Margaret Drabble and Selected Iraqi Novels: A Comparative Study

This thesis analyses physical and soft violence in Margaret Drabble’s novels: The Radiant Way (1987), The Gate of Ivory (1991), The Red Queen: A Transcultural Tragicomedy (2004) and The Pure Gold Baby (2013) and the works of four Iraqi contemporary novelists: Hadiya Husayn’s Ma ba‘d al-hubb (2003), or Beyond Love (2012), Ahmad Sa‘dawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), Lutfiya al-Dulaymi’s Saturn Ladies: A Tale of People and a City (2009) and Aliya Mamduh’s al-mahbubat (2003) or The Loved Ones (2006). The novels are paired thematically to explore the similarities and differences in the texts, and explore how writers from different countries and traditions engage with history and view their societies in terms of historical change and the development of their respective nations. Comparing Drabble to these different novels demonstrates how much they have in common as far as the theme of violence is concerned. The thesis demonstrates how the writers explore the effects of women's submission to and rebellion against violence and their depiction of how women suffer explicit and implicit violence in male-dominated societies in secrecy.
The work argues that physical and soft violence are interwoven and interconnected. So, where there is physical violence, there is nearly always soft violence and, though to a lesser extent, vice versa. Thus, soft violence can cause just as much damage, psychologically or literally, as hard violence.
This work is important because it is the first attempt at comparing Margaret Drabble to key contemporary Iraqi authors, especially when two of the novels under study are still extant in Arabic only. In addition, comparative cross-cultural studies of modern English and Arabic ficton are currently rare, so this study hopes to stimulate for further studies in this field in the future.