This volume, dedicated to Jaroslav Stetkevych, includes a number of original contributions that signify a rhetorical shift in the social sciences and Arabic studies. The articles and essays deal with Orientalism, classical Arabic tradition, Andalusian poetry, Francophone literature, translation, architecture and poetry, comparative studies, and Sufism. Literary production is studied in its own terms to situate these literary concerns in the mainstream of cultural studies. The outcome is a solid and highly sophisticated scholarship that makes this book one of the most needed among scholars and students of comparative literature, Arabic poetics and politics, Orientalism, Afro-Asian studies, East/West encounters and translation.

The Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms covers the most important literary terms relevant to classical and modern Arabic literature. Its 300+ entries include technical terms and rhetorical devices, themes and motifs, concepts, historical eras, literary schools and movements, forms and genres, figures and institutions. Defining terms such as 'root-play', highlighting schools such as the Mahjar poets, and exploring concepts such as 'imaginary evocation', the dictionary introduces its readers to the specificities of the Arabic literary tradition. The dictionary is intended to meet the needs of the growing number of students studying Arabic in the English-speaking world, whose studies include Arabic literature from an early stage. This reference resource equips them to understand the nuances and complexities of the texts they encounter. It is an invaluable reference work for students of Arabic literature.

Verse and prose, from the 6th century CE (pre-Islamic) to the early 18th century CE.

No Western scholar has contributed as much to the study of modern Arabic narrative as has Roger Allen. His doctoral dissertation was the very first Oxford D.Phil. in modern Arabic literature, completed in 1968 under the supervision of Mustafa Badawi. That same year, he took a position in Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest professorial post in Arabic in the United States. Roger Allen has been phenomenally prolific: fifty books and translations, two hundred articles and counting-on Arabic language pedagogy, on translation, on Arabic literary history, criticism and literature. He is also one of the most decorated and acclaimed translators of Arabic literature. The present volume brings together sixteen of Roger Allen's articles on modern Arabic narrative, with a focus on genre, translation and literary history, and features analyses of the works of Rashid Abu Jadrah, Bensalem Himmich, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tayeb Salih.

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.

Building upon previous volumes by the same editor, this book contains studies of nine of the most important writers of Arabic-language textual sources for the Crusades and the Frankish presence in the eastern Mediterranean in the period 1097-1291.

A rich and nuanced study of the Arabian Nights in world cultures, analysing the celebration, appropriation, and translation of the stories over time.

Threshold Time provides an introductory survey of the cultural, social and political history of Mexican American and Chicano literature, as well as a new in-depth analyses of a selection of works that between them span a hundred years of this particular branch of American literature. The book begins its explorations of the ?passage of crisis? with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, continues with Americo Paredes? George Washington Gomez, Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and ends with Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus and Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water. In order to do justice to the idiosyncrasies of the individual texts and the complexities they embrace, the analyses refer to a number of other texts belonging to the tradition, and draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches. The final chapter of Threshold Time brings the various readings together in a discussion circumscribed by the negotiations of a temporality that is strongly aligned with a sense of memory peculiar to the history of the Chicano presence in the United States of America.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: The Open Totality of Thresholds I. A History of Borderland Routes II. Literary Blossoming III. Disillusion and Defiance in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don IV. The Appropriate(d) Hero: Americo Paredes? George Washington GomezV. Exercises in Liminality: Tomas Rivera's ?And the Earth Did Not Devour Him VI. The Dialogic Mind: The Education of Richard Rodriguez VII. Memories of Landscape1. The Meaning of Place in Helena Maria Viramontes? Under the Feet of Jesus 2: The Threshold ? Benjamin Alire Saenz? Carry Me Like Water VIII. The Aesthetics of Time in Chicano Literature Bibliography Index

A selection of luminous, fiercely intelligent verse from Egypt’s premier poet. Iman Mersal is Egypt’s—indeed, the Arab world’s—great outsider poet. Over the past three decades, she has crafted a voice that is ferocious and tender, street-smart and vulnerable. Her early work captures the energies of Cairo’s legendary literary bohème, a home for “Lovers of cheap weed and awkward confessions / Anti-State agitators” and “People like me.” These are poems of wit and rage, freaked by moments of sudden beauty, like “the smell of guava” mysteriously wafting through the City of the Dead. Other poems bear witness to agonizing loss and erotic temptation, “the breath of two bodies that never had enough time / and so took pleasure in their mounting terror.” Mersal’s most recent work illuminates the trials of displacement and migration, as well as the risks of crossing boundaries, personal and political, in literature and in life. The Threshold gathers poems from Mersal’s first four collections of poetry: A Dark Alley Suitable for Dance Lessons (1995), Walking as Long as Possible (1997), Alternative Geography (2006), and Until I Give Up the Idea of Home (2013). Taken together, these works chart a poetic itinerary from defiance and antagonism to the establishment of a new, self-created sensibility. At their center is the poet: indefatigably intelligent, funny, flawed, and impossible to pin down. As she writes, “I’m pretty sure / my self-exposures / are for me to hide behind.”

Through a combination of case studies and theoretical investigations, the essays in this book address the imaginative power of the threshold as a productive space in literature and art.