Raymond P. Scheindlin

Michael Sells

María Rosa Menocal

Muḥammad Muṣṭafá Badawī

M. M. Badawi

Muhammad Mustafa Badawi

This volume provides an authoritative survey of creative writing in Arabic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Modern Arabic Literature

The Literature of Al-Andalus is an exploration of the culture of Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal, during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and in the centuries following the Christian conquest when Arabic continued to be widely used. The volume embraces many other related spheres of Arabic culture including philosophy, art, architecture and music. It also extends the subject to other literatures - especially Hebrew and Romance literatures - that burgeoned alongside Arabic and created the distinctive hybrid culture of medieval Iberia. Edited by an Arabist, an Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters compiled by a team of the world's leading experts of Islamic Iberia, Sicily and related cultures, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work which offers a interesting approach to the field.

The Literature of Al-Andalus

R. B. Serjeant

T. M. Johnstone

A. F. L. Beeston

G. R. Smith

The History provides an invaluable source of reference of the intellectual, literary and religious heritage of the Arabic-speaking and Islamic world.

Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

Exile and the Origins of the Lyric

Shards of Love

Menocal (Spanish and Portuguese, Yale U.) explores the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance through the birth of lyric poetry in the context of the conquest of the Americas and the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Includes nearly 100 pages of bibliographic essays. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

María Rosa Menocal

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