This book attempts to identify elements of mannerism and classicism in medieval Arabic poetry. Mannerism in Arabic has usually been linked with the appearance of an ornate rhetorical style called badi which became characteristic of poetry and prose from the fifth century AH/ninth century AD onwards. This study, however, is not so much concerned with the discussion of rhetorical devices as manifest in selected passages and individual lines of poetry; rather, it seeks to attain its objective through a structuralist analysis of complete poems. After the formulation of a hypothesis on the structural coherence of a cardinal form of poetic expression, the panegyric, structuralist analyses of selected poems from the medieval era follow, and the final chapter describes mannerism and classicism as contrasting styles in which the individual poem relates in fundamentally different ways to the literary convention from which it arises and the subject matter it portrays.
| ISBN: | 9780521522922 |
| Publication date: | 7th June 2004 |
| Author: | Stefan Sperl |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 240 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: poetry and poets Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval |