Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Transliteration xi
Introduction 1
Part I The Heroic and the Anti-Heroic in the Early Arabic Ode: The Qasidah
Chapter 1 The Hunt in the Pre-Islamic Ode 13
Chapter 2 The Hunt in the Ode at the Close of the Archaic Period 35
Chapter 3 Sacrifice and Redemption: The Transformation of an Archaic Theme in al-Hutay'ah 57
Part II The Hunt Poem as Lyric Genre in Classical Arabic Poetry: The Tardiyyah
Chapter 4 The Discreet Pleasures of the Courtly Hunt: Abu Nuwas and the 'Abbasid Tardiyyah 91
Chapter 5 From Description to Imagism: 'Ali Ibn al-Jahm's "We Walked over Saffron Meadows" 130
Chapter 6 Breakthrough into Lyricism: The Tardiyyahs of Ibn al-Mu'tazz 139
Chapter 7 From Lyric to Narrative: The Tardiyyah of Abu Firas al-Hamdani 184
Part III Modernism and Metapoesis: The Pursuit of the Poem
Chapter 8 The Modernist Hunt Poem in 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and Ahmad 'Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi 225
Chapter 9 The Metapoetic Hunt of Muhammad 'Afifi Matar 243
Notes 280
Bibliography 330
Index 343