TY - BOOK ID - 67237406 TI - Arabic poetics : aesthetic experience in classical Arabic literature PY - 2020 SN - 9781108490214 9781108780483 9781108748292 1108802141 1108780482 1108490212 1108808719 1108748295 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Poetics KW - Arabic poetry KW - Arabic language KW - History KW - History and criticism KW - Versification KW - Semitic languages KW - Versification&delete& KW - E-books KW - History and criticism. KW - History. KW - Poetics - History - To 1500 KW - Arabic poetry - 750-1258 - History and criticism KW - Arabic poetry - 1258-1800 - History and criticism KW - Arabic language - Versification - History UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:67237406 AB - What makes language beautiful? Arabic Poetics offers an answer to what this pertinent question looked like at the height of the Islamic civilization. In this novel argument, Lara Harb suggests that literary quality depended on the ability of linguistic expression to produce an experience of discovery and wonder in the listener. Analyzing theories of how rhetorical figures, simile, metaphor, and sentence construction are able to achieve this effect of wonder, Harb shows how this aesthetic theory, first articulated at the turn of the eleventh century CE, represented a major paradigm shift from earlier Arabic criticism which based its judgement on criteria of truthfulness and naturalness. In doing so, this study poses a major challenge to the misconception in modern scholarship that Arabic criticism was 'traditionalist' or 'static', exposing an elegant widespread conceptual framework of literary beauty in the post-eleventh-century Islamicate world which is central to poetic criticism, the interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics in Arabic philosophy and the rationale underlying discussions about the inimitability of the Quran. ER -