The literature of the third quarter of the twentieth century is dominated, almost everywhere in the Arab world, by the long aftermath of the 1967 defeat. The grand narratives of Arab unity, socialism, and decolonisation lost their authority overnight; the literature that came after is sceptical, fragmented, often satirical, and obsessed with the gap between the public language of Arab regimes and the realities on the ground.
The major figures of the period include Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Tayeb Salih, Sonallah Ibrahim, Sahar Khalifeh, Bahaa Taher, and Mourid Barghouti.
The Lebanese civil war (1975–90) produces a parallel and equally important literature in Elias Khoury, Hanan al-Shaykh, and Hoda Barakat; the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war supply the political backdrop for an entire generation of Iraqi writers who would go on to write the post-2003 fiction.
