| Author(s) | Abdulrahman Ismail Al Ismail |
| Affiliation | Associate Professor , Arabic Department, College of Arts King Saud University , Riyadh , Kingdom of Saudi Arabia |
| Title | Narrative Emulation in Arabic Literature |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Arts. Volume 16, No 1. (2004/1424) |
| Abstract | Modern Arab critics and scholars have been accustomed to restricting the usage of the term muaradhat “emulation” to poetry which resulted in the widespread of the term “al-mu aradhat al-shiriyyah” (poetic emulation) This fact accounts for the usage of this term to denote an independent genre that was popular in several literary periods. It was a field in which poets used to compete in order to exhibit their creative skills in their emulation of well-known poems of high quality and distinctiveness. The non-technical sense of the term does not have any specificity to poetry or prose , it only means emulation and imitation , in general . Ancient critics and scholars , however, used the term muaradhah in connection with both prose and poetry before it became a poetic term . In this study , I will try to exemplify the basic characteristics of narrative emulation, which differs in its characteristics from those of poetical emulation due to the differences specific to each genre . I will also apply these characteristics , in detail, to three narrative works : Ibn Shuhaid’s Al-Tawabi wa Alzawabi ; Al- Ma arriy’s Risalat Al-Ghufran ; and Ghazi Al-Qusaibi’s novel: Al-usfuriyyah . The study will be concerned with trying to find aspects of similarities and differences between these three works , and will try to trace the extent of the ancient writers’ influences on the later ones, and how deep these influences were , and what forms they take in the later works . |
