Through investigations of manuscripts, this book explores important aspects of the life of Badîʿ al-Zamân al-Hamadhânî’s Maqâmât. The broad concerns of the book are divided into three sections: authorship, texts, and contexts. Each chapter in this volume investigates hitherto unstudied textual materials related to al-Hamadhânî’s Maqâmât that adds to our understanding of the text, its history, and the literary culture that created it.

Literary works are much more than mere illustrations of societal conditions. Literature is the setting in which society discusses itself. In this volume, international scholars of Literary Studies as well as specialists in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish Studies explore the dimensions and ways of how writers, from the classical period to modernity, tackle the values of their societies.

A comparative analysis of the work of the South African poet Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) and the Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1942-2008), this study aims to demonstrate how a conflict of voices in their poetry emerged and developed across four stages, covering a period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. Based on a critique of theories proclaiming the ‘death of the author’, a productive approach to voice is elaborated while taking a modifying perspective on aspects such as ‘lyricism’, ‘polyphony’, and ‘impersonality’.

This book is about relations between literature, society and politics in the Arab world. It is an attempt to come to terms with the changing conceptualizations of the political in Arabic literature in recent modern history. It examines historical and contemporary conceptions of literary commitment (iltizām) and how notions of ‘writing with a cause’ have been shaped, contested, re-actualized since the 1940s until today. Against the backdrop of the current social and political transformations in the Arab world, questions on the role of the arts, specifically literature and its politics, arise with immediacy and require profound reflection and analysis.

This socio-literary study examines the relationship between processes of modernisation and reform, and new literary genres produced in Egypt of the second half of the 19th century. How did heterogenous modern literary forms emerge in this particular environment, and what were the underlying motivations of the new authors? Literature is regarded here as a specific sphere of knowledge and representation, facilitating in its modes of reflection novel individual and societal patterns of experience. If urbanity played a special role as constitutive element of narrative prose, ideas about new forms of public sphere and public opinion also played their role. The new means of text production, finally, attested to the recession of the auratic perception of a text.

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Near Eastern Literatures and participates in their ongoing dialogue with literary theory. It presents 19 different readings of Arabic, Persian and Turkish works from the classical and modern periods, throwing new light on the texts as well as discussing chosen theoretical models, their applicability, and interconnection.

Joseph, Jesus and Job are all immediately recognizable religious figures in both Christianity and Islam who have been incorporated into a range of artistic and literary projects both inside and outside the Arab world. This study examines how three Lebanese women authors borrow and use these religious figures within their works of creative fiction. It proposes that the social, political and literary contributions of these works are interlinked and that their messages, especially those related to religion and gender, emerge through their innovations and artistry as creative works. Drawing on the dual critical frameworks of intertextuality and postcolonial feminist theory, the study sets these works and their themes in relationship to multiple contexts, posing the question: Are these Arabic, French and/or Francophone novels? Should they be understood as Arab, Lebanese, and/or ‘Third’ World texts? As women’s literature? The works treated are: Hudā Barakāt’s Ḥajar al-ḍaḥik, Najwā Barakāt’s Ḥayāt wa-ālām Ḥamad ibn Sīlāna, and Andrée Chedid’s La femme de Job.

This book reframes the history of the Andalusian music of Morocco by highlighting the interplay of oral and literary processes in the preservation and transmission of this poetic-musical tradition across generations. Although oral communication and the social intimacy it fosters have been highly valued by participants in the tradition throughout its evolution from the elite music of Islamic Spain to its present status as Morocco’s national classical music, over the past two and a half centuries, written anthologies also have evolved as iconic representations of the tradition that function alongside the oral processes without replacing them. Davila brings a new approach to studies of the social foundations of Arabic poetic traditions by proposing a “value theory of tradition” and arguing that this “mixed orality” within the boundaries of the tradition persists because the two embody distinct but complementary sets of values.