Description: 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.
Review Quotes: '... the collection succeeds and will prove indispensable to those who would venture into this field... there is no gainsaying that usefulness and convenience of having it all in one place, not to mention the expediency of the select bibliography and index. More significant, though, is the impact of this collection: the reader is left with a sense of the immense cultural wealth of the early islamic world, an impression that stands in stark contrast to much of what is said about Islam nowadays. We would do well to remember these aspects of Arabic and Muslim cultural life more frequently. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych and the editors of 'The Formation of the Islamic World' have done us a great service in helping us to remember.' The Muslim World Book Review