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Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past (ND Poetics of Orality and Literacy) by Ali, Samer M. is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Arabic Literary Salons in the Islamic Middle Ages: Poetry, Public Performance, and the Presentation of the Past (ND Poetics of Orality and Literacy) about?

Arabic literary salons emerged in ninth-century Iraq and, by the tenth, wereflourishing in Baghdad and other urban centers, In an age before broadcastmedia and classroom education, salons were the primary source of entertainmentand escape for middle- and upper-rank members of society, serving also as aspace and means for educating the young. Although salons relied on a cultureof oral performance from memory, scholars of Arabic literature have focusedalmost exclusively on written sources of the tradition.That emphasis, argues Samer Ali, has neglected the interplay of oral andwritten, as well as of religious and secular knowledge in salon society, andthe surprising ways in which these seemingly discrete categories blurred inthe lived experience of participants. Looking at the period from 500 to 1250,and using methods from European medieval studies, folklore, and culturalanthropology, Ali interprets Arabic manuscripts in order to answer fundamentalquestions about literary salons as a social institution. He identifies salonsnot only as sites for socializing and educating, but as loci for performingliterature and oral history; for creating and transmitting cultural identity;and for cont

Author

Ali, Samer M.

Publisher

University of Notre Dame Press

Published

2008

Language

EN

ISBN

9780268020323

Subjects

Literary Criticism, History, Romance