Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes : The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition /

An astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to prov...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Reynolds, Dwight F. (Author)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Language Notes:In English.
Published: Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]
Series:Myth and Poetics
Subjects:
Online Access:Connect to the full text of this electronic book
Table of Contents:
  • Frontmatter
  • Contents
  • Illustrations
  • Foreword / Nagy, Gregory
  • Preface
  • Notes on Transcription and Transliteration
  • Introduction: The Tradition
  • Part One: The Ethnography of a Poetic Tradition
  • I. The Village
  • 2. Poets Inside and Outside the Epic
  • 3. The Economy of Poetic Style
  • Part Two: Textual and Performance Strategies in the Sahra
  • 4. The Interplay of Genres
  • 5. The Sahra as Social Interaction
  • Conclusion: Epic Text and Context
  • Appendix: Texts in Transliteration
  • Works Cited
  • Index