Arabic Poetics Aesthetic Experience In Classical Arabic Literature Lara Harb by Lara Harb 9781108490214, 9781108780483, 1108490212, 1108780482, 2019051666 instant download after payment.

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 judgment 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-tenth-century Islamicate
world that 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.