Adab
Arabic
Arabic culture
Arabic literature
Category=DCA
Category=DNL
Category=DSBB
Category=DSM
comparative literature
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Islamic history
Julia Bray
Product details
- ISBN 9781399543132
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Adab is not an English word, but it could become one. This collection, in honour of Julia Bray, experiments with juxtaposed articles, quotations, translations and lines of poetry to let readers create connections in the same way authors did a thousand years ago in Arabic. The collaboration is inspired by the ongoing work of Julia Bray, which continues to demonstrate the rewards of taking what we read seriously.
The field of Arabic studies is increasingly rejecting a hard line between the modern and the premodern. This book is an intervention in that development – arguing that the premodern can structure contemporary thinking. It offers translations, commentaries and discussions of important and insufficiently known primary texts together with the original Arabic text of poems. These cross-genre and cross-disciplinary connections can catalyse future research and show how a key feature of the Arabic literary tradition is relevant to how we think about scholarship today. The chapters provide readers with both an academic resource and an intellectual conversation with the past.
Alexander Key is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Language between God and the Poets: Ma‘na in the Eleventh Century (University of California Press, 2018) and is currently working on an under-contract edition and translation of al-Jurjani's Dala'il al-I'jaz for the Library of Arabic Literature. Letizia Osti is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Milan. She is the author/editor of numerous books, including most recently The Historian of Islam at Work: Essays in Honor of Hugh N. Kennedy (co-edited with Maaike van Berkel, Brill, 2022) and History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022).
