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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Risible Rhymes

Risible Rhymes

Al-Sanhūrī, Muḥammad Ibn Maḥfū&#7
Davies, Humphrey
Davies, Humphrey

Hardcover

Series: Library of Arabic Literature, Book 31

Fiction AnthologiesGeneral Middle Eastern History

ISBN10: 1479877921
ISBN13: 9781479877928
Publisher: New York Univ Pr
Published: Oct 4 2016
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf 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-Mutanabbī.

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-Sanhūrī's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.

A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

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