N°019_Vol.3_12

Introduction: Popular heritage has long constituted a significant cultural reservoir, comprising a wide range of folk arts that reflect the civilization of a given people, foreground the features of its identity, and safeguard it from disappearance. This heritage is preserved through its evocation and deployment in various forms of communication as well as in literary creation. Among its most prominent manifestations are the folk tale and the fairy tale. This study seeks to investigate the particularity of the use of the fairy tale in the works of the Tunisian writer Salah Eddine Boujah, whose fiction is marked by a strong inclination toward the incorporation of traditional narrative forms and techniques. This tendency reflects an attempt to produce a novelistic form that departs from the familiar, as well as a search for new experimental horizons within the Arabic novel. The return to narrative heritage and the appropriation of its forms thus assume a dual function: on the one hand, they serve a renewing purpose; on the other, they represent an effort to anchor the Arabic novel in its cultural soil and to endow it with authentic foundations. Accordingly, we have sought to understand why the author, in particular, draws upon this traditional form, namely the marvelous or fantastical tale. We also examine how the marvelous and the strange are manifested and intertwined with the components of the fictional world in the novel, and what suggestions and significations the author intended to convey through his evocation of this inherited narrative form. The objective of this study is to identify the new narrative techniques employed by the author in his pursuit of experimentation within the Arabic novel, and consequently to move beyond prevailing conventional patterns through innovation and variation in the mechanisms of novelistic construction, with the aim of producing an effect of wonder in the reader.