Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Y suf al-Shirb n 's Brains Confounded by the Ode ...
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Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Y suf al-Shirb n 's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab Sh d f Expounded , which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems--another popular genre of the day--and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabb . Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanh r 's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
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Add this copy of Risible Rhymes to cart. $39.20, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2016 by New York University Press.
