This volume tackles complex theoretical questions about sex and gender and the way that they inform classical Arabic poetics.
Arabic literature has a rich tradition of women's poetry, and of lamentation for the dead in particular. Dr Hammond argues that these elegies - marthiya - were received into the literary canon because they echoed the familiar male paradigm of the qas?da, or the heroic ode, while at the same time recasting its spatial and temporal axes from a feminine authorial stance. The volume then moves on to consider women's compositions in non-elegiac genres, such as invective...

Throughout his distinguished career devoted to the study of Arabic language and literature, Geert Jan van Gelder sustained a particular interest in humour and irreverence: in muj n, broadly understood as literary expressions of indecency, encompassing the obscene, the profane, the impudent, and the taboo. Contributors to this honorific compilation tackle this subject from a wide variety of perspectives beyond the merely prurient in studies detailing the ways in which indecency has been signified, signalled, evaluated, and preserved, and including translations and commentaries of exemplarily...