Desert literature or desert in literature is a huge topic that includes not only the frequently used imaginative desert imagery and allusions symbolizing physical, emotional, and psychological hardship, separation, suffering, and loneliness, but also the fictional or autobiographical treatment of the vast physical desert expanses all across the world in the equally vast amount of travel literature available. Only a narrowed-down selection can be used at a time for a useful discussion from a certain perspective. There is a body of desert-specific literature by the native writers of the Middle East, for example, as well as the Western explorers and travelers to the region in modern times in which real desert life and land becomes the focus of the human action and interaction in the main plot. Like all travelers and explorers in the past, for instance, Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, modern writers brought with them a scientifically-oriented interdisciplinary mind that enabled them to watch the balance and regulation of environmental variables in the rugged and barren nature from the point of view of ecology, which is as much a biological science as a human one.

In most cases, as they draw a picture of desert landscape together with the desert community and their tribal or traditional culture and customs, they are also drawn to having a glimpse into the interdependence of the living forms or organisms and their arid environment, thereby reflecting their ecological, evolutionary, and environmental awareness. Desert scenery or desert biomes with their biotic as well as abiotic conditions provide the writers with an opportunity to express their conceptions of human and natural ecology. They find environmental pollution and degradation as affecting human relations to natural surroundings and contributing to global warming and climate change. Writing about the desert and its flora and fauna and what it all means, critically or creatively, involves a reflection of the knowledge and sensitivity to the biodiversity, biogeography, and biogeochemistry that characterize such a place of aridity and emptiness. Therefore, it goes without saying that one can find in desert literature plenty of elements for ecological discourse and rhetoric, one of the latest and most modern critical approaches to the study of literature.

English Studies Journal, Wordsworth’s, “Arab Dream”, Intertextual Acquaintances, Arabian Desert, Literature, Personal Encounter, Symbolic, Middle East, Glory to God, Saimoom.