In this paper I argue that some of the novels of the Arabic Nahda period, and especially those of Nu'man Abdu al-Qasatili of Damascus, were in effect an effort to re-envision masculinity and the role of the “new man,” an attempt that was embedded within a discourse of femininity and the “new woman.” While the discourse regarding women and femininity in this period was carried out openly in both non-fictional and fictional texts, views and reflections concerning men and masculinity were overwhelmingly expressed in fictional texts. By inspecting these novels, historians can construct the discourse of masculinity in the Arab provinces under the Ottoman Empire, which so far has been little explored. I view Qasatili's novels as an integral cultural product of the ‘renaissance’ period and as a major medium for the renegotiation of gender. Thus I see novels of this period as fictional and factual texts and as cultural artefacts which offer powerful examples of how a culture “thinks” at a particular historical moment. I approach these novels as historical tools, which enable us to reconstruct the contours of this gender discourse and re-evaluate its significance for modern Arab gender relations. I argue first that in these novels, written during the late nineteenth century by the first generation of young Arab novelists, two models of masculinity, an older generation’s and that of a younger generation, are competing for hegemony. The authors posited and offer two alternative paths to the victory of modern Arab masculinity: a “revolutionary,” confrontational mode, and an “evolutionary,” sequential one. Secondly, I argue that in order to mitigate the anxiety produced by this struggle, these novelists first took up the primordial concept of masculinity, imbued it with new gender significance, and posited it in their novels as the model for the modern Arab masculinity. Concomitantly, they deployed the figure of the young “new woman” both as a vehicle to enable this shift from the older generations model of masculinity to that of the younger generation, and to displace the generational unease from young men onto young women. Finally, within the context of this panel, this paper represents an attempt to bridge not only the disciplinary divide, but also the lingual one. Discussing the literature of the Arabic Nahda within its historical Ottoman context will serve to illuminate communalities and differences between literary works published in Ottoman-Turkish and in Arabic and stimulate further comparative study.