Orientalist narratives of Arab literary history often frame the modern Arabic novel as a borrowing, assimilation or translation of 'European literary modernity,' without addressing the dialogic interplay between local modes of cultural production and hegemonic structures of colonial or global power. Despite the diverse ethno-linguistic constitution of the Maghreb, the region’s cultural, and particularly literary history have long been read through the totalizing lens of French imperialism and it's attendant timeline of pre, post and neo-colonialism. Across the Maghreb, however, the literary avant-garde of the mid-late twentieth century was interested in generating a new vision of cultural production and innovation that called many of these categories into question. Between the 1930s and 1960s, a flurry of interdisciplinary journals began appearing throughout the Maghreb: 'al-'Alim al-Adabi' and 'al-Mabahith’ in Tunisia, 'Confluent,' 'Souffles/Anfas' and 'Atlantes' in Morocco, as well as 'Novembre' in Algeria. These journals were run and contributed to by an intelligentsia that sought to redefine the interface between form and critique. Through their critical writings, experimental fiction and pivotal translations, this generation of thinkers – which included Zayn al-'Abdin al-Sanusi, Mahmud al-Mas'adi, Mohammed Berrada, Malek Haddad, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Abdellatif Laâbi and Kateb Yacine – was instrumental in bringing regional issues of decolonization, linguistic pluralism and Islamic modernism into dialogue with broader debates on humanism, Marxism and globalization. Building upon this intellectual history, my paper argues that these narrative interventions reveal the shared ethical and aesthetic stakes underlying the concept of 'Adab' – as both a demarcation of genre and the moral dimensions of personal and social conduct. I posit that in both their literary and critical writings, these thinkers continued to reimagine post-Nahda intellectual debates surrounding the question of 'iltizam' or literary commitment. Their works thus blurred the line between novelistic and other discursive forms – both theological and 'secular.'