This volume tackles complex theoretical questions about sex and gender and the way that they inform classical Arabic poetics.
Arabic literature has a rich tradition of women's poetry, and of lamentation for the dead in particular. Dr Hammond argues that these elegies - marthiya - were received into the literary canon
because they echoed the familiar male paradigm of the qas?da, or the heroic ode, while at the same time recasting its spatial and temporal axes from a feminine authorial stance. The volume then
moves on to consider women's compositions in non-elegiac genres, such as invective and erotic verse. Dr Hammond also addresses the questions of authenticity that arise when a woman's poem is
preserved anecdotally, embedded as dialogue in a story that is narrated, transmitted, and redacted by men.
Spanning diverse genres, historical epochs, and geographic locations, this volume will acquaint its readers with all manner of women's verse compositions from the pre-Islamic Arabian lament to
the medieval Andalusian love lyric.
