Terri DeYoung

CHOICE 1998 Outstanding Academic Books This is a comprehensive study of the most widely celebrated of twentieth-century Iraqi writers, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, whose premature death in 1964 from Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) was lamented in cultural circles throughout the Arab world. This book makes available to English-speaking readers for the first time an unprecedented amount of information about a single Arab poet (including a large selection of previously untranslated poetry). In addition, it places the poet's work in the broader context of postcolonial resistance to Western hegemony, illuminating obscure aspects of his writing and relating it to other authors of his time.

Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq

Placing the Poet

Roger Allen

Mona Radwan

Jonathan Smolin

Essays by Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Revolt of the Young

Makes available, for the first time in English, the work of a major modern Arab poet, providing a framework for understanding his experience not only as an Arab writer but as a postcolonial one.

To explore the life of Mahmud Sami al-Barudi is to gain a nuanced perspective on the many facets—the perils and promises—of change in the rapidly modernizing Egypt of the nineteenth century. Al-Barudi, sole scion of a Turko-Circassian elite family that clung precariously to a legacy of position and power, turned his military education into a government career that ended with his elevation to the office of prime minister. He served briefly before the British invasion in 1882 put an end to Egypt’s independence for seventy years. As prime minister, al-Barudi focused on drafting and passing into law Egypt’s first constitution, an achievement that was summarily swept aside by the British occupation. Similarly, the prime minister’s efforts to modernize and improve the educational system were systematically undermined by the policies of colonial rule in the 1880s and 1890s. Although his reforms ultimately failed, al-Barudi was recognized among his contemporaries as the most consistent supporter of liberalism and eventually democratic representation and constitutionalism. For his boldness, he paid a price. He was exiled by the British to Ceylon for seventeen years and returned to Egypt in 1901 as a blind, prematurely aged, and broken man. Even before he made an impact as a political leader, al-Barudi had made a name for himself as the most original and adventurous poet of his generation. DeYoung charts the development of al-Barudi’s poetry through his youth, his career in government, his philosophical and elegiac reflections while in exile, and his return to Egypt at the beginning of a new century. Connecting the themes found in his more influential poems—among the more than 400 lyrics he composed—to the turbulent events of his political life and to his equally fierce desire to innovate artistically throughout his literary career, DeYoung offers a vivid portrait of one of the most influential pioneers of Arabic poetry.

Reconfiguring Society and the Self

Mahmud Sami Al-barudi

This dissertation investigates an important new development in twentieth-century Arabic poetry: the use of myth as a major thematic component and structuring device of the poetic work, which generally is assumed to be a borrowing from Western literature.

A Study of Myth in Modern Arabic Poetry

And Thereby Hangs a Tale

Roger M. A. Allen

Joseph Edmund Lowry

Mary S. St. Germain

Devin J. Stewart

The essays, which discuss authors in a variety of literary genres and across the spectrum of the region concerned-from Iraq in the East to Tunisia in the West-provide clear evidence of the gradually changing roles of the indigenous and the imported which are an intrinsic feature of the movement known in Arabic as al-bahada (cultural revival) and the way in which Arab litterateurs chose to respond to the inspiration that such changes inevitably engendered. --

Terri DeYoung

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