{"product_id":"9781479857524","title":"Risible Rhymes","description":"Written in mid-17th century Egypt, \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eBrains Confounded\u003c\/em\u003e 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. \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e 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 tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Taken as a whole, \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e 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.","brand":"New York University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47107645374704,"sku":"9781479857524","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781479857524_p0.jpg?v=1763618437","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781479857524","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}