Arabic Poetics

Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature

AvLara Harb

Häftad, Engelska, 2021

Del i serien Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2021-10-28
Mått:152 x 228 x 16 mm
Vikt:480 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization
Antal sidor:320
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781108748292

Utforska kategorier

Mellanösterns historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Mer om författaren

Lara Harb is an Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where she specializes in classical Arabic literary theory, and Arabic conceptions of the 'literary'. She is the author of articles in journals including Journal of American Oriental Society and Middle Eastern Literatures. Her Ph.D. was awarded the S. A. Bonebakker Prize for the best thesis in Classical Arabic Literature in 2014.

Recensioner i media

'Lara Harb has reconstructed the development of literary theory in Arabic with unfailing lucidity, precision and a wealth of fascinating detail. Even as her book offers an illuminating account of such questions as poetic reasoning, the varieties of literary figures, and the status of the Qur'ān in Arabic culture, it advances the new and stimulating thesis, arguing that wonder, in Arabic poetics, becomes implicitly and explicitly 'the defining aesthetic experience of poetic language'.' Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University, New Jersey

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction; 1. Wonder: a new paradigm; 2. Wonder in Aristotelian Arabic poetics; 3. Discovery in Bayān; 4. Metaphor and the aesthetics of the sign; 5. Naẓm, wonder, and the inimitability of the Quran; Epilogue. Faṣāḥa, balāgha, and poetic beauty.