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...

A bilingual anthology of poems from the sixth century to the present, Arabic Poems is a one-of-a-kind showcase of a fascinating literary tradition.

The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. Themes of love, nature, religion, and politics recur in works drawn from the pre-Islamic oral tradition through poems anticipating the recent Arab Spring.

Editor Marle Hammond has selected more than fifty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds: for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland,...