Houman Nazemian, Zhila Azimi,
Volume 3, Issue 1 (Fall and winter 2022 2022)
Abstract
New historicism is an approach that emerged in response to traditional methods and traditional historicism in the late 20th century. New historians consider history a set of conflicting discourses and address the marginalized voices. They believe that what historians write is not an objective recording of the past events but the interpretation and narrative of the past events based on the discourse of historians. Therefore, history has a discursive nature and is a tradition of narration. In 2012 Rabee Jaber the Lebanese novelist won the International Prize for Arabic fiction for his novel “Druze of Belgrade”. This thesis tries to examine the novel from the perspective new historicism in order to recognize the relation of text with historical discourses. the results of the study show that there are six discourses represented in this article: the discourse of ottoman government, the discourse of European governments, the dialogue of the Balkans, the discourse of prisoners of prisoners, the discourse of Lebanese Christians, and the discourse of Muslims of the Balkans. It also shows that the novel focuses on the marginalized voices and the victims of sectarian violence and governance, whose representatives are on one side, imprisoned Druze, and by the other, Hanna Yacoub and his family. The novel tries to provide a positive image of Druze, contrary to official discourse of Ottoman Empire.
