Arabic Poetics
Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature

Reveals how an aesthetic of wonder underlay the classical Arabic treatments of poetry, the Quran, and Aristotelian poetics.

Lara Harb (Author)

9781108490214, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 May 2020

318 pages
23.4 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.56 kg

'Harb explores the evolution of the aesthetic theory of Arabic poetry in the middle Abbasid era. She demonstrates a shift from poetry valued for its 'naturalness' and 'truthfulness,' dating from pre-Islamic Arab times, to poetry esteemed for its 'eloquence' and ability to engender feelings of 'wonder' and 'discovery.' Harb argues that this new paradigm turns the notion of poetic beauty on its head … Finally, Harb offers this aesthetic as potentially relevant to the study of other literatures.' M. F. McClure, Choice

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.

Introduction
1. Wonder: a new paradigm
2. Wonder in Aristotelian Arabic poetics
3. Discovery in Bay?n
4. Metaphor and the aesthetics of the sign
5. Na?m, wonder, and the inimitability of the Quran
Epilogue. Fa???a, bal?gha, and poetic beauty.

Subject Areas: Islam [HRH], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]