Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Middle Eastern

Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia. It has been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others and praised by William Jones, Tagore, E. M. Forster and many more. Yet although in the past few years the poems of Rumi have attracted the kind of popular attention enjoyed by Omar Khayyam in the 19th century, Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves.

A History of Persian Literature...

Arabic and Persian panegyric poetry was one of the most important genres of literature in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Jocelyn Sharlet argues that panegyric poetry is important not only because it provides a commentary on society and culture in the medieval Middle East, but also because panegyric writing was one of the key means for individuals to gain social mobility and standing during this period. This is particularly so within the context of patronage, a central feature of social order during these times. Sharlet places the medieval Arabic and Persian panegyric firmly...

In Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet s Art and His Nation, Mattawa pays tribute
to one of the most celebrated and well-read poets of our era. With
detailed knowledge of Arabic verse and a firm grounding in Palestinian
history, Mattawa explores the ways in which Darwish s aesthetics have
played a crucial role in shaping and maintaining Palestinian identity and
culture through decades of warfare, attrition, exile, and land confiscation.
Mattawa chronicles the evolution of his poetry, from a young poet igniting
resistance in occupied land to his decades in exile where his...

Di'bil b. 'Al (765--860) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the best satirists in the school of Arabic poets which flourished during the early 'Abb sid age. Leon Zolondek has collected, translated, and annotated 229 fragments of Di'bil's verse and has assembled materials for a reconstruction of his long-lost yet widely quoted Book of the Poets. Arabic texts of the poems and of the citations of Book of the Poets are included.

Drawing from medieval chivalric culture, the prose romance was a popular early modern genre featuring stories of courtship, combat, and travel. Flourishing at the same moment as the growing English trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, prose romances adopted both Eastern settings and new conceptions of masculinity - commercial rather than chivalric, erotic rather than militant.

Knights in Arms moves beyond the best-known examples of the genre, such as Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to consider the broad range of texts which featured the Eastern Mediterranean in this era....

Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics introduces and makes available, for the first time in English, an incandescent corpus of experimental leftist writing from North Africa. Founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laabi and a small group of avant-garde Moroccan poets and artists and banned in 1972, Souffles-Anfas was one of the most influential literary, cultural, and political reviews to emerge in postcolonial North Africa. An early forum for tricontinental postcolonial thought and writing, the journal published texts ranging from...

Ahmad was the first...