Middle Eastern

This book explores the intricately crafted rhetorical strategies used by al-Jahiz in his letters. The 9th-century essayist, theologian and encyclopedist 'Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz has long been acknowledged as a master of early Arabic prose writing. One of...

During what has become officially known as the genocide against the Tutsi, as many as one million Rwandan people were brutally massacred between April and July 1994. This book presents a critical study of fictional responses by authors inside and outside...

From the stories of wives and their lovers to those of kings and their conquests, to the overarching story of Shahrazad and Shahryar, the tales of the Arabian Nights have offered countless audiences entertainment and enjoyment as well as serving as...

This bilingual anthology presents the best of Arabic classical poetry's musings over the many faceted states of the human condition, among them love, generosity, life, time, youth, beauty, ecstasy, longing, wine, death, and plenty more. Mansour Ajami's...

Friendship, though esteemed, has not been central in critical studies. It has been overshadowed by other bonding relationships. However, it figures as a privileged theme in classical, medieval, renaissance, and modern philosophy. More recently,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789087281977Author Bahman SolatiFormat PaperbackPage Count 300Imprint Leiden University PressPublisher Leiden University Press

Women Write Iran is the first full-length study on life narratives by Iranian women in the diaspora. Nima Naghibi investigates auto/biographical narratives across genres-including memoirs, documentary films, prison testimonials, and graphic novels-and...

Liron Mor's book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine-Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an "original sin" that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion...

Arabs and the Art of Storytelling, the eminent Moroccan literary historian and critic Kilito revisits and reassesses, in a modern critical light, many traditional narratives of the Arab world. He brings to such celebrated texts as A Thousand and One...

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system of checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian movement. Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers have grappled with the spread of these...

CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the...

By assembling a range of fictional works from different parts of the Arab world that incorporate older characters, this book draws on a range of theoretical approaches to aging, particularly from the perspective of gender and feminism, to reconcile the...

Brings forth the Islamicate as an aesthetic and critical force in World Literature Disrupts the one-way traffic in the field of World Literature studies by regarding Islam as both an alternative and a critical force behind creative processes ...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789087282271Author Riccardo ZipoliFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint Leiden University PressPublisher Leiden University Press

By analysing its position within the struggles for recognition and reception of different national and ethnic cultural groups, this book offers a bold new picture of Israeli literature. Through comparative discussion of the literatures of Palestinian...

" . . . transcends the realm of literature and poetic criticism to include virtually every field of Arabic and Islamic studies." -Roger AllenThroughout the classical Arabic literary tradition, from its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia until the end of the...

Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms...

"A struggle between two memories" is how Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish describes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Within this struggle, the meanings of land and home have been challenged and questioned, so that even heaps of stones...

Three of the most renowned praise poems to the Prophet, the mantle odes span the arc of Islamic history from Muhammad's lifetime, to the medieval Mamluk period, to the modern colonial era. Over the centuries, they have informed the poetic and religious...

"Quite simply: these are seminal essays. . . . Distinguished scholarship, erudite, and full of innovative ways of interpreting Arabic and Persian poetry." -Omar Pound"[This book] reads Arabic and Persian poetry in a refreshingly new and significant way. ...

Authors of autobiographies are always engaged in creating a "self" to present to their readers. This process of self-creation raises a number of intriguing questions: why and how does anyone choose to present herself or himself in an autobiography? Do...

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi's comics, and "Baghdad Blogger" Salam Pax's Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789087283353Author Behnam FomeshiFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Leiden University PressPublisher Leiden University Press

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of...

The extreme anti-Western actions and attitudes of Iranians in the 1980s astonished and dismayed the West, which has characterized the Iranian positions as irrational and inexplicable. In this groundbreaking study of images of the West in Iranian...

Journeys in the Levant. "How to speak of the imaginative reach of a land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths and heresies, confluences and ruptures...trouble spot and findspot, ruin and renewal, fault line and ragged clime, with a medley of people and...

Sadeq Hedayat is the most famous and the most enigmatic Iranian writer of the 20th century. This book is the first comprehensive study of Hedayat's life and works set against the background of literary and political developments in a rapidly changing...

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917-1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of...

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film and art. The book...

Love has been an important trope in the literature of the region we now call the Middle East, from ancient times to modern. This book analyses love poetry in various ancient and contemporary languages of the Middle East, including Akkadian, ancient...

"A charming and agreeable surprise . . . A welcome gift to Western readers." -Kirkus Reviews"Editor Jayyusi offers a major example of the Arabic folk epics or romances called siras . . . The siras are full of heroic adventures, exotic landscapes, love...

Distinguished literary critic Bodour is trapped in a loveless marriage and carries with her a dark secret. She fell in love in her youth and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Bodour doesn't know...

Psychoanalysis and the Love of Arabic reorients the debates around Arabic and global modernity in relation to psychoanalysis, capitalism and universality. The study offers the first psychoanalytic reading of 19th-century works written during the nahda...

Poetry is the quintessence of Arab culture. In this book one of the foremost Arab poets reinterprets a rich and ancient heritage. He examines the oral tradition of the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia and the relationship between Arabic poetry and the...

In this book William C. Chittick provides a first-time look at historic Persian literature and the topic of love, which is at the heart of Islamic spiritual thought. It contains extensive Arabic and Persian material, from the Qur'an up through the...

Winner of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award 2013.Chronicles of Majnun Layla and Selected Poems brings together in one volume Haddad's seminal work and a considerable selection of poems from...

Ever since Neolithic times Greek lands lay open to cultural imports from western Asia: agriculture, metal-working, writing, religious institutions, artistic fashions, musical instruments, and much more. Over the last sixty years scholars have...

A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field.Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that...

This unique work takes a method of textual analysis commonly used in studies of ancient Western and Eastern manuscripts and applies it to twenty-one early Qur'an manuscripts. Keith Small analyzes a defined portion of text from the Qur'an with two aims in...

These seven poems, translated by A. J. Arberry in 1957, are the most famous survivors of a vast mass of poetry produced in the Arabian Desert in the sixth century. Arberry's introduction explains to the reader what was known about the poems and how they...