In the literary history of Arabic, modernism in the Arabic novel is generally attributed to the dislocating effects of historical and political events: the nakba, the naksa, and most aptly for this context, the Lebanese Civil War. The Civil War, in the telling of both authors and critics, was such a profound social rupture that it necessitated an adoption of new forms of representation. While these claims can certainly be justified with a reading of the development of Lebanese novel, in this paper I will explore a different hypothesis than that of modernism as a sort of political aesthesis or “response” to events in the world. In my paper, I discuss two authors who began publishing fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, Ilyas al-Dayri and Yusuf Habashi al-Ashqar. Both of these authors adopted the settings and some of the stylistic modes of the tradition of fiction developed by Marun Abbud and Lahad Khatir among others—that of the folklore of Mount Lebanon, the sympathetic ethnographic gaze. However, in Ashqar and Dayri’s writings, the Mountain they depicted was one that was integrated in to and implicated in the political, ideological and economic transformations of the mid-twentieth century. The villages they represented in their works were in the process of emptying and transforming into petrified relics of estival tourism, and the protagonists were adopting new relations of political and social affiliation. Their striking adoption of modernist literary modes-such as stream of consciousness and pastiche, as well as the frequent references to European thought—was in may ways just as novel as the thematic transformations in their work. Using these authors’ works, I argue for another possible genealogy for “literary modernism” and indeed the modern novel in Lebanon. I argue that the growth of the modern(ist) novel was not a response to the Civil War, but rather as befits authors operating in an autonomous literary sphere, it arose, at least in large part, out of a studied reworking of established tropes and narrative forms.