In Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics, Suzanne Stetkevych presents a selection of the formative studies of classical Arabic poetry of the past thirty-five years, a period that has witnessed the increasing integration of classical Arabic poetry into the contemporary humanistic disciplines. For the qasida, the Arabic heroic and then courtly ode, the selected studies engage orality theory, Structuralism, ritual theory, myth, gender, ekphrastic and interarts theory, speech act and performance theory, to produce an aesthetics and sociology of poetic form. Works on the ghazal, the wine-poem, and other lyric forms reveal their sociological, psychological, structural, and thematic distinction from, and relation to, the dominant qasida-form. Stetkevych's Introduction contextualizes the selected articles in a concise critical and bibliographical essay on the major achievements and trajectories of the field.

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Director of Graduate Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Contents: Introduction. Oral composition in pre-Islamic poetry, James T. Monroe; Structuralist interpretations of pre-Islamic poetry: critique and new dimensions, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych; Islamic kingship and Arabic panegyric poetry of the early 9th century, Stefan Sperl; The poetic coterie of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 247 H.): a contribution to the analysis of authorities of socio-literary legitimation, J. E. Bencheike; The uses of the qasida: thematic and structural patterns in a poem of Bashshar, Julie Scott Meisami; Abbasid praise poetry in light of dramatic discourse and speech act theory, Beatrice Gruendler; Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's trespass, Dana Sajdi; Time and reality in nasib and ghazal, Renate Jacobi; Heterotopia and the wine poem in early Islamic culture, Yaseen Noorani; Sensibility and synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rumi's singing slave girl, Akiko Motoyoshi; Name and epithet: the philology and semiotics of animal nomenclature in early Arabic poetry, Jaroslav Stetkevych; Guises of the ghul: dissembling simile and semantic overflow in the classical Arabic nasib, Michael A. Sells; From primary to secondary qasidas: thoughts on the development of classical Arabic poetry, M.M. Badawi; Toward a redefinition of 'badi' poetry, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych. Index.