Comprised of leading international scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry incorporates political, cultural, and theoretical paradigms that help place poetic projects in their socio-political contexts as well as illuminate connections across the continuum of the Arabic tradition. This volume grounds itself in the present moment and, from it, examines the Arabic poetic tradition's transformations through readings, re-readings, translations, reformulation, and co-optation as they appear in subsequent poetic projects. Furthermore, this collection aims to deconstruct the artificial modern/pre-modern divide and to present the Arabic poetic practice as live and urgent, shaped by the experiences and challenges of the twenty-first century and at the same time in constant conversation with its long tradition. The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry actively seeks to destabilize binaries, such as that of East-West in contributions that shed light on the Arabic tradition's active interactions with other Middle Eastern traditions such as Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew and on South-South ideological and poetic networks of solidarity that informed poetic currents across the modern Middle East. This volume will be ideal for scholars and professional readers of Arabic, Middle Eastern Literature and comparative literature as well as non-specialists interested in poetry and in the present moment of Arabic poetry.
About the Author: Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is interested in the role of the Arabic qaṣīda as a space for negotiating the foreign and the indigenous, the modern and the traditional, and its relationship to other poetic forms such as the free verse poem and the prose poem. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2021). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Middle Eastern Literatures, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. She is the Coeditor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. She is a specialist in Classical Arabic poetry. Her publications, in English and in Arabic, are primarily concerned with the ritual, performance, and performative underpinnings of the structure and function of classical Arabic poetry in its literary-historical setting. She engages ritual theory, rite of passage, gift exchange, and sacrificial rituals; the socioeconomic role of the qaṣīda; the ceremonial aspects of qaṣīda performance as a courtly negotiation of status and legitimacy; and the spiritually and politically transformative role of madīḥ nabawī (praise poetry to the Prophet Muhammad). Among her books are: Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the 'Abbāsid Age (Brill, 1991); The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Cornell University, 1993, paperback 2011); The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Indiana University, 2002); The Mantle Odes: Praise Poems to the Prophet Muḥammad in the Arabic Tradition (Indiana University, 2010); and The Cooing of the Dove and the Cawing of the Crow: Late ʿAbbāsid Poetics in Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī's□Saqṭ al-Zand□and□Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (Brill, 2023). She is the Executive Editor of the Brill Studies in Middle East Literatures monograph series, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Arabic Literature.
