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"In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 as an "Age of Decay" followed by an "Awakening" (al-nahdah). His sweeping synthesis debunks this view by carefully documenting a "republic of letters" in the Islamic Near East and South Asia that was vibrant and dynamic, one varying considerably from the generally accepted image of a centuries-long period of intellectual and literary stagnation. Al-Musawi argues that the massive cultural production of the period was not a random enterprise: instead, it arose due to an emerging and growing body of readers across Islamic lands who needed compendiums, lexicons, and commentaries to engage with scholars and writers. Scholars, too, developed their own networks^ to respond to each other and to their readers. Rather than addressing only the elite, this culture industry supported a common readership that enlarged the creative space and audience for prose and poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic. Works by craftsmen, artisans, and women appeared side by side with those by distinguished scholars and poets. Through careful exploration of these networks, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters makes use of relevant theoretical frameworks to situate this culture in the ongoing discussion of non-Islamic and European efforts. Thorough, theoretically rigorous, and nuanced, al-Musawi's book is an original contribution to a range of fields in Arabic and Islamic cultural history of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. "Muhsin al-Musawi's work systematizes a huge body of primary literary texts and current scholarship under a compelling and original thesis. The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters will be the starting point for a new generation of scho larship on this six-hundred-year 'republic of letters' that stretched from India to North Africa." --Suzanne P. Stetkevych, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Georgetown University"--

Islam --- History of civilization --- anno 500-1499 --- Arabic literature --- Islamic literature --- RELIGION / Islam / History. --- HISTORY / Medieval. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval. --- History and criticism. --- Religion --- History --- Literary criticism --- Arabic literature. --- Islamic literature. --- Islam. --- Literatur. --- Arabisch. --- Schriftlichkeit. --- Kultur. --- Wissen. --- Intellektueller. --- Netzwerk. --- History. --- Medieval. --- 1258-1800.

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What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.

Phonetics --- Poetry --- English literature --- anno 1300-1399 --- anno 1400-1499 --- anno 1500-1599 --- anno 1600-1699 --- English language --- English poetry --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval. --- Poetics --- Poetics. --- Versification. --- Periodization. --- Early modern. --- History and criticism --- Middle English. --- History. --- 1100-1700. --- Versification --- History --- Periodization --- Metrics and rhythmics --- Prosody --- Germanic languages

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This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry's work in the world. These poets' works challenge the traditional boundaries drawn around lyric's utility. They show us how poems could be sites of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of shaping it.

Sociology of the family. Sociology of sexuality --- Poetry --- Italian literature --- poetry --- gender [sociological concept] --- Renaissance --- Petrarca, Francesco --- Social and cultural history. --- Literary studies: poetry and poets. --- Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Italian. --- Literary studies: classical, early and medieval. --- Petrarchism, lyric, gender, women writers, masculinity. --- Sex role in literature. --- Italian poetry --- History and criticism. --- Petrarca, Francesco, --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called 'green' terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world, puzzlement about how we relate to it, and anxiety about what we, as humans, are doing to it. So called green or eco-criticism acknowledges this concern.Greenery reaches back and offers new readings of English texts, both known and unfamiliar, informed by eco-criticism. After considering general issues pertaining to green criticism, Greenery moves on to a series of individual chapters arranged by theme (earth, trees, wilds, sea, gardens and fields) which provide individual close readings of selections from such familiar texts as Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Chaucer's Knight's and Franklin's Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Langland's Piers Plowman. These discussions are contextualized by considering them alongside hitherto marginalized texts such as lyrics, Patience and the romance Sir Orfeo. The result is a study which reinvigorates our customary reading of late Middle English literary texts while also allows us to reflect upon the vibrant new school of eco-criticism itself.

Nature in literature. --- English literature --- Ecocriticism. --- Ecological literary criticism --- Environmental literary criticism --- Criticism --- Nature in poetry --- History and criticism. --- Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval. --- Literature. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval. --- Literary Studies: Classical, Early & Medieval. --- British literature --- Inklings (Group of writers) --- Nonsense Club (Group of writers) --- Order of the Fancy (Group of writers) --- Belles-lettres --- Western literature (Western countries) --- World literature --- Philology --- Authors --- Authorship --- Middle English. --- Middle English literature --- Thematology --- Old English literature --- History of the United Kingdom and Ireland --- anno 1200-1499 --- Sir Orfeo. --- earth. --- eco-criticism. --- fields. --- gardens. --- natural world. --- sea. --- trees. --- wilds.