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

Dwight F. Reynolds

Published by Cornell University Press 1995

Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes

The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition

Dwight F. Reynolds
Funded by: National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program

In the series Myth and Poetics

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501723223

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 provide a context for social interaction and commentary. Reynolds’s account is based on performances in the northern Egyptian village in which he studied as an apprentice to a master epic-singer. Reynolds explains in detail the narrative structure of the Sirat Bani Hilal as well as the tradition of epic singing. He sees both living epic poets and fictional epic heroes as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audiences concerning such vital issues as ethnicity, religious orientation, codes of behavior, gender roles, and social hierarchies.

Author / Editor information

Dwight F. Reynolds is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Arab Folklore: A Handbook and editor and coauthor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition and The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture.

Reviews

Peter Heath:

Reynolds’s book both complements the works of his predecessors and surpasses them in the area on which he focuses. With it, we have a full and methodologically sophisticated treatment of the social poetics of Sirat Bani Hilal performance that is a model of how such research should be conducted.

Virginia Danielson:

The richness of Reynolds’s text and his scholarly accomplishment serve as poignant reminders of how little we know about Arab folk performances and how difficult it is to teach these great traditions to our students.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Open Access Download PDF	ix
Foreword Gregory Nagy Open Access Download PDF	xi
Preface Open Access Download PDF	xiii
Notes on Transcription and Transliteration Open Access Download PDF	xvii
Introduction: The Tradition Open Access Download PDF	1
Part One: The Ethnography of a Poetic Tradition
I. The Village Open Access Download PDF	23
2. Poets Inside and Outside the Epic Open Access Download PDF	48
3. The Economy of Poetic Style Open Access Download PDF	102
Part Two: Textual and Performance Strategies in the Sahra
4. The Interplay of Genres Open Access Download PDF	137
5. The Sahra as Social Interaction Open Access Download PDF	177
Conclusion: Epic Text and Context Open Access Download PDF	207
Appendix: Texts in Transliteration Open Access Download PDF	213
Works Cited Open Access Download PDF	227
Index Open Access Download PDF	239

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 128
Keywords: Middle East Studies; Medieval & Renaissance Studies; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781501723223