With the spread of the printing press in Egypt and the Levant by the early 19th century,[1] Egyptian, Lebanese and Syrian newspapers and magazines increased the publication of Arabic short stories and sections of original or translated novels, influenced by the Western world.
The works of writers of this stage such as Salim Al-Bustani, Labibah Hashim, Khalil Gibran, Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti and others were described as romantic, and they had adapted Western short story techniques.
Writers of this new stage, such as Muhammad Taymour, Tahir Lashin and others, felt it necessary of studying its techniques in Western literature and approach it in an innovative way.
And finally, “The Formative Stage,” (Arabic المرحلة التشكيليّة) which extends from 1925 to the present, was started by Mahmoud Taymour, where a new narrative style emerged emphasizing the development and psychological analysis of the characters in the stories with a more realistic approach.
[citation needed] In the 1960s, the Arabic short story achieved a distinguished level in specific artistic characteristics, including an insistence on its length, encompassing a short narrative time frame, having critical and psychological details, written in prose language, with a minimal number of characters, and conveying an ambiguous ending, which leaves the reader to his own imagination and interpretation.