Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Middle Eastern

A woman not only needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote, but also the freedom to leave it and return to it at will; for a room without that right becomes a prison cell. The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional "right" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the...

A body of Bedouin oral poetry which was collected in the second or third Islamic century, the pre-Islamic qasidah, or ode, stands with the Qur'an as a twin foundation of Arabo-Islamic literary culture. Throughout the rich fifteen-hundred-year history of classical Arabic literature, the qasidah served as profane anti-text to the sacred text of the Qur'an.

While recognizing the esteem in which Arabs have traditionally held this poetry of the pagan past, modern critics in both East and West have yet to formulate a poetics that would provide the means to analyze and...

The five influential women writers discussed in Seymour Jorn s timely work Radwa Ashour, Salwa Bakr, Nemat el Behairy, Etidal Osman, and Ebtihal Salem all emerged on the literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They came of age at a time when women s writing was attracting critical attention and more venues for publication were opening up. This widening platform enabled these writers to develop and mature as cultural critics. As a result, this generation of women writers achieved a successful blend of politically and socially committed literature with artistically innovative...

This book is a translation of one of the most important Turkish scholarly works of the twentieth century. It was the masterpiece of M.F. Koprulu, one of Turkey's leading, and most prolific, intellectuals and scholars. Using a wide variety of Arabic, and especially Turkish and Persian sources, this book sheds light on the early development of Turkish literature and attempts to show the continuity in this development between the Turks and that of Anatolia. Early Mystics in Turkish Literature addresses this topic within the context of other subjects, including Sufism, Islam and the...