Western literary forms replaced indigenous genres down to the level of language itself

Evidence

The Westernization of art was paralleled in literature, though at a slower pace and at a later date. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, traditional literary forms were neglected, except among some diehard circles with limited impact. In their place came new forms and ideas from the West—the novel and the short story, replacing the traditional tale and apologue; the essay and the newspaper article, and new forms and themes that have transformed modern poetry among all the peoples of the region. Even the language in which modern literature is written has, in all the countries of the region, been extensively and irreversibly changed under the influence of Western discourse. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1140

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the ‘HOW the region became legible’ mechanism: the adoption of the Western novel as the region’s self-expression medium is a canonical Orientalist-knowledge argument Lewis makes. — connects to: Most North American Indigenous languages will be extinct by 2050 — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 679; Colonial Indian writers adopted English chiefly for technical fields, not literature — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1182; Western literary genres displaced traditional Islamic forms across the whole region (+1 more)