Beyond Elegy
Classical Arabic Women's Poetry in Context

9780197264720, OUP Oxford

Hardback, published 11 November 2010

224 pages
23.8 x 16.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.488 kg

This volume tackles complex theoretical questions about sex and gender and the way that they inform classical Arabic poetics. Arabic literature has a rich tradition of women's poetry, and of lamentation for the dead in particular. Dr Hammond argues that these elegies - marthiya - were received into the literary canon because they echoed the familiar male paradigm of the qas?da, or the heroic ode, while at the same time recasting its spatial and temporal axes from a feminine authorial stance. The volume then moves on to consider women's compositions in non-elegiac genres, such as invective and erotic verse. Dr Hammond also addresses the questions of authenticity that arise when a woman's poem is preserved anecdotally, embedded as dialogue in a story that is narrated, transmitted, and redacted by men. Spanning diverse genres, historical epochs, and geographic locations, this volume will acquaint its readers with all manner of women's verse compositions from the pre-Islamic Arabian lament to the medieval Andalusian love lyric.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]