Covers a range of literary and linguistic subjects from pre-Islamic times to the twentieth century.

Covers a range of literary and linguistic subjects from pre-Islamic times to the twentieth century.

In this collection of essays, various manifestations of traditional as well as modern and postmodern themes and techniques in Arabic literature are explored. For the first time the tripartite concepts of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literary works are analyzed in one volume.

This volume provides an authoritative survey of creative writing in Arabic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

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.

Roger Allen here offers an account of the cultural tradition of literary texts in Arabic, from their unknown beginnings in the fifth century AD to the present day. Allen's organising principle is not that of traditional literary histories, but is rather based on an account of the major genres of Arabic literature. After introductory chapters on principles and contexts, there are chapters devoted to the Qur'an as literature, poetry, belletristic prose, drama and criticism. Within each chapter the emphasis is on the texts themselves, and those who created and commented on them, but Allen also demonstrates his awareness of recent Western theoretical and critical approaches. The volume as a whole, which contains extensive quotations in English translation, a chronology and a guide to further reading, makes a major non-Western literary tradition newly accessible to students and scholars of the West.

The study of Arabic literature is blossoming. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to help research this highly prolific and diverse production of contemporary literary texts. Based on the achievements of historical poetics, in particular those of Russian formalism and its theoretical legacy, this framework offers flexible, transparent, and unbiased tools to understand the relevant contexts within the literary system. The aim is to enhance our understanding of Arabic literature, throw light on areas of literary production that traditionally have been neglected, and stimulate others to take up the fascinating challenge of mapping out and exploring them.

This path-breaking book offers a re-examination of the east-west (Egyptian-French) cultural encounter during the early period of the renaissance or nahda in 19th-century Egypt, through looking closely at the particular contact zone of literary translations, specifically some of the earliest translations of prestigious French literature into Arabic. In this unprecedented study, in contrast with views that presume a passive top-down model of cultural influence, Carol Bardenstein formulates a more complex and ambivalent model - a transculturating one. She shows how - within the translations themselves - an indigenous sensibility is asserted and elaborated, running against the grain of the apparently deferring gesture of borrowing from the French literary tradition, which was viewed by many in the Egyptian intellectual vanguard as having the prestige and cultural capital to civilize an Egypt and an Arabic literary tradition that was perceived as being belated in its development. In translations of works by La Fontaine, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Moliere and Racine, Muhammad Uthman Jalal indigenized the texts in various ways, Arabizing, Islamicizing, and Egyptianizing the textual field. Not only did this translational approach create a corpus of indigenized literary texts, but it also implicitly engaged in the process of experimenting with different possible delineations of the contours of the collective or community that was to produce what was to become modern Arabic literature. In so doing, it anticipated many later explicit ideological formulations about the nature of possible or desired configurations of collective affiliation and identification, as Arab, pan-Arab, regional Egyptian along nationalist lines, pan-Islamic etc., with the passing of Ottomanism.

Islam on the Street deals with the popular side of Islam, as described not only in tracts and manuals written by Sufi shaykhs and Islamist thinkers from among the more militant groups in Islam, but also in writings by other, more secular thinkers who have also influenced public opinion. A scholar of Arabic literature, Muhsin al-Musawi explains the growing rift that has occurred between the secular intellectual—the forerunner of Arab and Islamic modernity since the late nineteenth century—and the upsurge of Islamic fervor in the street, at the grassroots level, and what these secular intellectuals can do to reconnect with the masses. Using some of the most important Arabic and Islamic poetry, prose, and fiction to come out of the twentieth century, Al-Musawi provides context for the complex images of Arab and Islamic culture given by the various social, religious, and political groups, providing the motivations. Readers interested in the influence of religion and secularism within modern Islamic Arabic literature will find that the author addresses the presence of Islam and Sufism in ways that secular commentators have been incapable of doing.