How Do You Say "Epigram" in Arabic?: Literary History at the Limits of Comparison

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-90-04-34996-4
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 40, 338 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 612 g

Reihe: Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures

The qasidah and the qit'ah are well known to scholars of classical Arabic literature, but the maqtu', a form of poetry that emerged in the thirteenth century and soon became ubiquitous, is as obscure today as it was once popular. These poems circulated across the Arabo-Islamic world for some six centuries in speech, letters, inscriptions, and, above all, anthologies. Drawing on more than a hundred unpublished and published works, How Do You Say “Epigram” in Arabic? is the first study of this highly popular and adaptable genre of Arabic poetry. By addressing this lacuna, the book models an alternative comparative literature, one in which the history of Arabic poetry has as much to tell us about epigrams as does Greek.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Talib, Adam

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Literatur des Nahen Ostens & Nordafrikas
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Preamble: Growth and Graft

On Wholeness

1 A Bounding Line
2 The Sum of its Parts

Arabic Poetry, Greek Terminology

Preliminary Remarks
3 Epigrams in the World
4 Hegemonic Presumptions and Atomic Fallout
5 Epigrams in Parallax

Appendix
Annotated Bibliography of Unpublished Sources
Sources
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Adam Talib, DPhil (2014) Oxford, teaches Arabic language and literature at Durham University and is an assistant editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature. Before joining Durham, he taught at the American University in Cairo from 2012–2017.