The Manifestations of Folklore in Saud Al-Sanousi's novel My Mother Hassa's Mice

Abstract

This research aims to study Arab folklore in the novel My Mother Hassa's Mice by the Kuwaiti novelist Saud Al-Sanousi; to look at the manifestations of this heritage and its types and quality, and to find out whether the heritage has connotations in the novel, and what is the role of heritage investment in building a novel. This novel was chosen due to the richness of Arab heritage it contains. The research adopted the descriptive analytical approach, taking advantage of the narrative analysis mechanisms of Michael Bakhtin and Gérard Genet and other modern critics of narration, according to a methodology devoted to revealing the folklore represented in the novel in four sections, namely: proverbs, popular culture, folk tales, and folk songs. The research reached several results, most notably that Al-Sanousi enhanced the energies of the novel and its worlds, through the openness of the narrative structure, with traditional variations of folklore, which revealed the narrator’s influence on the popular heritage and making use of it in the narrative construction of the novel. The employment of folklore in the novel led to the expansion of its connotations and, according to Bakhtin, imparting of narrative techniques to its narrative structure.