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This article identifies literary cross-currents and meeting-points in modern literature in the making in the UAE and Oman. During roughly three decades (1970-2000) immense changes have taken place in these countries. Adjusting to the global, urbanised life of the metropolis and information technology in the service of intercultural exchange are issues which have occasioned scepticism towards modernity and globalisation. Literature in the UAE and Oman expresses an effort to shake off some of the vestiges of traditional Western realism as well as to comment on the rapid transformation that has overturned pre-oil society. This literature is marked by an ambivalence between old and new, tradition and modernity and indigenous and foreign, all of which have been prevalent forces throughout the shaping of modern Arabic literature.