From the very beginning, still in the depths of the colonial era, and being a national response to French colonial literature, the poetry and fiction of Maghreb writers became a form of expression of the real life of their countries and a testimony of the social and political transformations that finally led to the social and political contradictions of the post-independence age. The evolution of literary genres has constantly induced writers not only to diagnose the protest forms of the national self-consciousness of the peoples of the Maghreb, but also to predict the social cataclysms and events to which the radicalization of Islam and the tread of political Islamism actually lead,

The Maghreb literature of the XX-XXI centuries constantly testified to various processes of the surrounding reality. Sometimes these forms of expression of the state of public consciousness turned into the nostalgic conceptualization of the past, a past perceived as a kind of an Oasis of acquired Knowledge about the World. These oases also refracted mirages of a dialogue between the Maghreb peoples and the French, which actually did never take place because of the wars of liberation. However, in the Maghreb literature, these illusions sometimes were transformed into dystopias, which especially since the decade of the 1990s turned into premonitions of real threats of radical Islamism.

In the global literary process, the work of the Maghreb writers - regardless of the countries of their residence in the West or in the East - reflects the searching for ideals of justice, remains an evidence of the era of transition from colonialism to post-colonialism, and a source of plausible forecasts for the future.