Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization #: Arabic Poetics

Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature

Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization #: Arabic Poetics
Lara Harb
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Hardback
h234 x 158mm - 318pg
14 May 2020 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781108490214
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What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analyzing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the eleventh century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was 'traditionalist' or 'static', exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-eleventh-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran.

Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi'ism, 850-950 CE
Animals in the Qur'an
Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature
Child Custody in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice in Egypt since the Sixteenth Century
Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq
Collective Liability in Islam: The Aqila and Blood Money Payments
Empire and Power in the Reign of Suleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World
First of the Modern Ottomans, The: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif
Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization, and the Making of a Written Tradition
Law and Piety in Medieval Islam
Law and Politics under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni
Logic of Law-Making in Islam, The: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition
Muhammad's Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622-950
New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran, The: Tradition, Memory and Conversion
Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire
Origins of the Shi'a: Identity, Ritual and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa
Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment
Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World, The
Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco
Second Ottoman Empire, The: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World
Shiites of Lebanon Under Ottoman Rule 1516-1788, The
Sufi Saint of Jam, The: History, Religion, and Politics of a Sunni Shrine in Shi'i Iran
Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference
Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam

'Lara Harb has reconstructed the development of literary theory in Arabic with unfailing lucidity, precision and a wealth of fascinating detail. Even as her book offers an illuminating account of such questions as poetic reasoning, the varieties of literary figures, and the status of the Qur'an in Arabic culture, it advances the new and stimulating thesis, arguing that wonder, in Arabic poetics, becomes implicitly and explicitly 'the defining aesthetic experience of poetic language'.' Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University, New Jersey
'A comprehensive work of classical Arabic philology and a beautifully written study of the art of literary criticism. Lara Harb shows how a millennium of scholarship in Arabic explained the wonder that readers feel as they journey through images in poetry: emotional experience catalyzed by formal innovation.' Alexander Key, Stanford University, California
'An insightful analysis of the aesthetics of muhdath or 'modern' Arabic poetry ... It chronicles a paradigm shift in literary criticism of the 10th-11th centuries, from a focus on the accuracy or truth of artistic representation to a focus on the poet's ability to manipulate language and to create wonder. A truly fundamental contribution to Arabic literary studies.' Devin Stewart, Emory University, Atlanta
'Lara Harb has reconstructed the development of literary theory in Arabic with unfailing lucidity, precision and a wealth of fascinating detail. Even as her book offers an illuminating account of such questions as poetic reasoning, the varieties of literary figures, and the status of the Qur'an in Arabic culture, it advances the new and stimulating thesis, arguing that wonder, in Arabic poetics, becomes implicitly and explicitly 'the defining aesthetic experience of poetic language'.' Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University, New Jersey
'A comprehensive work of classical Arabic philology and a beautifully written study of the art of literary criticism. Lara Harb shows how a millennium of scholarship in Arabic explained the wonder that readers feel as they journey through images in poetry: emotional experience catalyzed by formal innovation.' Alexander Key, Stanford University, California
'An insightful analysis of the aesthetics of muhdath or 'modern' Arabic poetry ... It chronicles a paradigm shift in literary criticism of the 10th-11th centuries, from a focus on the accuracy or truth of artistic representation to a focus on the poet's ability to manipulate language and to create wonder. A truly fundamental contribution to Arabic literary studies.' Devin Stewart, Emory University, Atlanta
Lara Harb is an Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where she specializes in classical Arabic literary theory, and Arabic conceptions of the 'literary'. She is the author of articles in journals including Journal of American Oriental Society and Middle Eastern Literatures. Her Ph.D. was awarded the S. A. Bonebakker Prize for the best thesis in Classical Arabic Literature in 2014.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781108490214
Published: 14 May 2020
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 234mm
Width: 158mm
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 560g
Pages: 318

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