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Firdausi's great epic poem, The Book of Kings or Shahnama, does for the formative myths, legends and early history of Iran what Homer's tales do for the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. It narrates the history of mankind from the creation of the world, putting Iran at the centre of the Universe, from the dawn of time to the destruction of the Persian Empire in the early 7th century AD at the hands of the conquering Muslim Arabs. One of the Bodleian Library's treasures is a copy of this Iran...

Bodour, a distinguished literary critic, carries with her a dark secret. As a young university student, she fell in love with a political activist and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Zeina grows up to become one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers, despite being deprived of a family name and a home. Bodour in turn remains trapped in a loveless marriage, pining for her daughter and lost love. In an attempt to find solace, she writes a f...

Unlike The Literary Atlas of Cairo, which focuses on the literary geopolitics of the cityscape, this companion volume immerses the reader in the complex network of socioeconomic and cultural lives in the city. The seven chapters first introduce the reader to representations of some of Cairo’s prominent profiles, both political and cultural, and their impact on the city’s literary geography, before presenting a spectrum of readings of the city by its multiethnic, multinational, and multilingual w...

The Arabian Nights and Orientalism in Resonance was especially commissioned to celebrate the tercentenary of the first Western edition of The Arabian Nights. This volume marries Western and Japanese perspectives on The Arabian Nights to provide a fascinating study of how this literary phenomenon brought about a unique and rich cross-cultural fertilization. The volume is divided into three sections: the first part deals with narrative motifs and styles; the second part examines the 'Nights' from...

"Al-Iqd al-Farid" ("The Unique Necklace"), translated now for the first time into English, is one of the classics of Arabic literature. Compiled in several volumes by an Andalusian scholar and poet named Ibn 'Abd Rabbih (246-328 H./860-940 C.E.), it remains a mine of information about various elements of Arab culture and letters during the four centuries before his death. Essentially it is a book of adab, a term understood in modern times to specifically mean literature but in earlier times its...

Cet ouvrage est le premier d'un triptyque. Il a pour objectif de faire le tour des questions litteraires importantes de la poesie berbere. C'est ainsi que sont abordes: 1. Les genres poetiques: on aborde des themes de terminologie autochtone quant a la nomination generique de la poesie et a ses genres. 2. L'aspect traditionnel et moderne: on etudie a la fois les traits caracteristiques generaux de la production orale et de la production ecrite recente (performance, langue poetique, fonction du...

In this fascinating study, Muhsin J. al-Musawi shows how deeply Islamic heritage and culture is embedded in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights (known to many as the Arabian Nights) and how this integration invites readers to make an Islamic milieu. Conservative Islam dismisses The Thousand and One Nights as facile popular literature, and liberal views disregard the rich Islamic context of the text. Approaching the text with a fresh and unbiased eye, al-Musawi reads the tales against Islami...

This bilingual anthology presents the best of Arabic classical poetry's musings over the many faceted states of the human condition, among them love, generosity, life, time, youth, beauty, ecstasy, longing, wine, death, and plenty more. Mansour Ajami's selection of topical verses and poems is guided by what was deemed best in its genre by the consensus of the great classical Arab literary critics and theoreticians.

Composed by Grigor Magistros, an 11th-century Armenian princely savant and friend of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus (reigned 1042-55), the Magnalia Dei is a summation of the Bible in epic verse. Written on one of the author's visits to Constantinople, it resulted from an encounter there with a Moslem intellectual by the name of Manazi - none other than Abu Nasr al-Manazi, vizier and emissary of the Abbasid Caliphate, theologian and poet, who frequently visited Constantinople in...

This is an anthology of outstanding literary importance, probably the most valuable work of Arabic poetry to surface this century. It contains the largest and best collection of Andalusian Muwashshat , 354 in all, of which over 280 are not known from any other source. Arabic text.

This magical collection of stories, gathered from the rich treasury of Persian folk and fairytales, tells of love and longing, fate and human ingenuity, loss and grace. Although sources of these tales have been lost over the ages, their memory runs through the collective psyche of the Iranian people. Handed down through generations, told by professional storytellers in bazaars and gatherings, these tales have been made popular the world over by great poets such as Rumi and Firdowsi. At the same...

In Arabs and the Art of Storytelling, the eminent Moroccan literary historian and critic Kilito revisits and reassesses, in a modern critical light, many traditional narratives of the Arab world. He brings to such celebrated texts as A Thousand and One Nights, Kalila and Dimna, and Kitab al-Bukhala' refreshing and iconoclastic insight, giving new life to classic stories that are often treated as fossilized and untouchable cultural treasures. For Arab scholars and readers, poetry has for centuri...

This study emphasizes the pattern of literary change in Iran, as it focuses on the relationship between the constructive elements of literary creativity, literary movement, ideology, and metaphorical language of modern Persian authors.

Heralding a new period of creativity, In the Wake of the Poetic explores the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cultural expression in the last two decades. As it increasingly gains a significant presence on the international scene, much of Palestinian art owes a debt to Mahmoud Darwish, one of the finest contemporary poets, and to Palestinian writers of his generation. Rahman maps the immense influence of Darwish's poetry on a new generation of performance artists, visual artists, spoken-wo...

Mahmoud Darwish's work has long been considered seminal in shaping modern Arabic poetry. He has received wide international recognition and is a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. Often deemed the 'Poet of the Resistance', no substantial critical study exists that addresses the complexity of Darwish's poetry in rewriting the homeland and articulating exile.This volume examines the complex connections between poetry, myth, lyric, prose, and history in Darwish's poetry, plus a number of scholar...

W. G. Lambert's line drawings of cuneiform tablets from the British Museum, together with his meticulous editions of their contents, form a contribution to Assyriology unrivaled in his generation. Upon his death in 2011, Lambert bequeathed his academic legacy to A. R. George, who discovered among its contents approximately 1,400 unpublished pencil drawings. He and Junko Taniguchi took over the task of converting the drawings into images suitable for publication. The first of two planned volume...