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Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded
pits the "coarse" rural masses against the "refined" urban
population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural
"types"-peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural
dervish-offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness,
and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious
parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of
his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named
Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding
the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to
the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with
digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains
Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that
includes a comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the
pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible
Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were
another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between
scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet
al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer
intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt,
showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and
stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era. An
English-only edition.
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Risible Rhymes (Hardcover)
Muhammad Ibn Mahfuz Al-Sanhuri; Edited by Humphrey Davies
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R741
Discovery Miles 7 410
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part
a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the
pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's
countryside. The interest in the countryside as a cultural, social,
economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in
this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature.
As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly
younger contemporary, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the
Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, which also takes examples of
mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The
overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate
from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in
Ottoman Egypt. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle
poems-another popular genre of the day-and presents a debate
between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century
poet al-Mutanabbi. Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes offers
intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt,
showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and
stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanhuri's day
and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era. A
bilingual Arabic-English edition.
Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded
pits the "coarse" rural masses against the "refined" urban
population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural
"types"-peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural
dervish-offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness,
and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious
parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of
his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named
Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding
the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to
the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with
digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains
Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that
includes a comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the
pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside. Risible
Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were
another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between
scholars over a line of verse by the fourth/tenth-century poet
al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer
intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt,
showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and
stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era. An
English-only edition.
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