Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn Al-Rumi and the Patron's Redemption

ISBN-13: 9780700714902 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 368 str.

Beatrice Gruendler;Beatrice Gruendler

Opis

This book gives an insight into panegyrics (madih), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern Society. Poets in this multi-ethnic society, using Arabic as their written idiom, would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials, and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat. Stylized and artistic, making it difficult to read, and not fitting the modern self-absorbed notion of poetry, this important topic has until now largely escaped scholarly attention. The panegyric ocuvre of Ibn al-Rumi, dedicated to the last Tahirid governor of Baghdad is ideally suited to the study of the function of madih as the poet makes the issue of literary patronage a topic within his poems, yielding a vocal self-portrait as well as a fully-fledged ethic of literary patronage. Combining philological and theoretical-interpretative methods, this study presents and Ibn al-Rumi's madih pragmatically and linguistically, and examines the application of this dramaturgy to defend an 'ethic of patronage' against an examination of the role of poetry in medieval Near Eastern Society and the history of research on the panegyric ode. T

This book gives an insight into panegyrics, a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern Society. Poets in this multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials, and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat.

Spis treści

Part 1: Setting the Stage  1. Background  2. The Form: The Abbasid Praise Qasida  3. The Approach: Mad'ih and Pragmatics  4. The Protagonists: Ibn al-Rum'i and His Patron, Ubaydall'ah b. Abdall'ah  5. The Mah'ih Exchanged between Ibn al-Rum'i and Ubaydall  Part 2: Speech and Characterization  6. Speech as Action  7. The Dramatis Personae  Part 3: The Dramaturgy  8. The Scene  9. The Episode and its Witnesses  10. 'The Passion of Him Whose Parting Has Grayed its Affection' Translation of £191  11. 'They Aimed at My Heart From the Gaps of Veils' Translation of £1042 x Preliminaries  Part 4: Verbal Ornament  12. Supporting Figures of Speech  13. Phantasmagoria  Part 5: Ibn al-Rum'i's Ethics of Patronage  14. On the Mirror of Mad'ih  15. Mutual Duties and Rights of Benefactor and Protégé  16. Acts and Words between Panegyrist and Model  Conclusion: Dramaturgy as a Rhetoric of Ethics

O autorze

Beatrice Gruendler