This book attempts to identify elements of mannerism and classicism in medieval Arabic poetry. Instead of focusing on rhetorical devices, as is conventional in such studies, the author carries out a structuralist analysis of complete poems.
The book is the first study of the 10th century Iraqi poet Ibn al-Hajjaj who popularized a new genre of obscene and scatological parody (sukhf) and is considered the most obscene poet in Arabic literature. Antoon traces the genealogy of this fascinating genre in and examines its rise by placing it in its sociopolitical context.
Since the late 1940s, Arabic poetry has spoken for an Arab conscience, as much as it has debated positions and ideologies, nationally and worldwide. This book tackles issues of modernity and tradition in Arabic poetry as manifested in poetic texts and criticism by poets as participants in transformation and change. It studies the poetic in its complexity, relating to issues of selfhood, individuality, community, religion, ideology, nation, class and gender. Al-Musawi also explores in context issues that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shi’i poetics, Sufism, women’s poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness. Arabic Poetry employs current literary theory and provides comprehensive coverage of modern and post-modern poetry from the 1950s onwards, making it essential reading for those with interests in Arabic culture and literature and Middle East studies.
Wolfhart Heinrichs’ Essays and Articles on Arabic Literature: General Issues, Terms is the first of two volumes that showcase a great number of Heinrichsʼ writings on his central field of research: Arabic literature. This volume specifically looks at poetry and rhetoric, and their indigenous theories and terminologies. Wolfhart Heinrichs (1941-2014) was James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University. He is remembered as a significant adviser to Fuat Sezginʼs fundamental Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums; as an editor of and contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second edition; and, most importantly, as an author of many independent studies on Arabic literature, many which were groundbreaking in the history of Arabic philology. He is also known for his studies on Semitic linguistics and Islamic jurisprudence. This volume collects relevant bibliographical data, offers an introductory essay on the author by his distinguished student Michael Cooperson (UCLA), and provides a selection of Wolfhart Heinrichs’ essays. The articles in this volume deal with general issues in the field that are central to pre-modern Arab and Islamic culture, and their concepts and terminologies. An index of classical authors, book titles, and technical terms concludes the volume. This volume and the accompanying volume will appeal to students and researchers in the field of Arabic and Islamic Studies, and particularly to those interested in Arabic literature.
Employing contemporary literary theory, eight members of the "Chicago school" of Arabic and Persian literature reorient the critical approach to classical Middle Eastern literature. The authors analyze a broad spectrum of poetry, ranging from the pre-Islamic ode of the sixth century to seventeenth-century Persian Safavid Moghul verse. Among issues considered are the ritual and sacrificial aspects of literature, the transition from orality to literacy, the iconographical and mythic dimensions of philology, and imitation as a form of creation. The inclusion of contemporary translations of all the poems discussed is an important feature for students of Middle Eastern literature and comparative poetics.
In Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition Huda J. Fakhreddine expands the study of metapoesis to include the Abbasid age in Arabic literature. Through this lens that is often used to study modernist poetry of the 20th and the 21st century, this book detects and examines a meta-poetic tendency and a self-reflexive attitude in the poetry of the first century of Abbasid poets. What and why is poetry? are questions the Abbasid poets asked themselves with the same persistence and urgency their modern successor did. This approach to the poetry of the Abbasid age serves to refresh our sense of what is “modernist” or “poetically new” and detach it from chronology.
Comprised of contributions from leading international scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry incorporates political, cultural, and theoretical paradigms that help place poetic projects in their socio-political contexts as well as illuminate connections across the continuum of the Arabic tradition. This volume grounds itself in the present moment and, from it, examines the transformations of the fifteen-century Arabic poetic tradition through readings, re-readings, translations, reformulations, and co-optations. Furthermore, this collection aims to deconstruct the artificial modern/pre-modern divide and to present the Arabic poetic practice as live and urgent, shaped by the experiences and challenges of the twenty-first century and at the same time in constant conversation with its long tradition. The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry actively seeks to destabilize binaries such as that of East-West in contributions that shed light on the interactions of the Arabic tradition with other Middle Eastern traditions, such as Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew, and on South-South ideological and poetic networks of solidarity that have informed poetic currents across the modern Middle East. This volume will be ideal for scholars and students of Arabic, Middle Eastern, and comparative literature, as well as non-specialists interested in poetry and in the present moment of the study of Arabic poetry.
What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analyzing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the eleventh century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was 'traditionalist' or 'static', exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-eleventh-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran.
This study is an attempt to identify and describe the distinctive features of the poetic style of the acclaimed medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Khafaājah, who has been credited with starting a new school of poetry, in Andalus and elsewhere. It offers a close reading of his poetry, concentrating on the three basic elements of style — imagery, rhetorical devices, and structural patterns. It shows how Ibn Khafājah creatively uses the poetic tradition available to him to form new images and scenes, create multi-layered poems, and bestow different levels of unity and coherence on his poems. The study demonstrates some of the ways by which the various elements of style are combined and interrelated, to produce original, meaningful, and highly moving poems in the Khafajian style.
This reference work covers the classical, transitional and modern periods. Editors and contributors cover an international scope of Arabic literature in many countries.