The standard English-language history of Arabic literature has long been The literary history of the Arabs by Reynold A. Nicholson, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, first published as long ago as 1907, but reprinted several times. To this day it remains a sympathetic, and indeed a valuable, introduction to one of the world's great literatures, but much water has flowed under the bridge since it first appeared, and the only general survey in English to appear since then, H. A. R. Gibb's Arabic literature (Oxford, 1926, 2nd revised edn 1963), is very condensed and makes no pretence at covering the immense field of Arabic literature in depth. It was the need for a more extensive history, to take in new fields and survey the results of over half a century of research, that prompted the Cambridge University Press to establish, in several volumes, a new history of Arabic literature on a much larger scale.

Since the beginning of the century, an enormous number of previously unknown manuscripts has been brought to light and catalogued, while a vast range of classical, medieval and later texts has been published in editions of varying quality. The two small original volumes of Carl Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (1898–1902) may be compared with the three bulky volumes of its Supplement (the last appeared in 1942), and this, in turn, with the six large volumes of Fuat Sezgin's Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums in current production, yet covering only the literature up to 430/1039, in order to comprehend the tremendous developments that have taken place.