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The Modern Arabic Literary Language
Lexical and Stylistic Developments
Jaroslav Stetkevych. Foreword by Roger Allen
Georgetown University Press, 2006

The Modern Arabic Literary Language is a thoughtful examination of the changes that the Arabic language has undergone in its transition from its roots in classical Arabic to a language able to meet the demands of twentieth-century life.

In this volume a respected and masterful scholar of the Arabic language Jaroslav Stetkevych notes the ways that new words have been incorporated into the language, ranging from deriving new terms from existing roots (for example, the word for "newspaper" derives from the word meaning "sheet to write on") to downright assimilation of foreign words. Also noting the changes in grammar and semantics, Stetkevych illustrates how literary Arabic has become a more flexible language. Originally published in 1970, this volume is a clear assessment of lexical and stylistic developments in Modern Literary Arabic.

This classic book is an important resource for scholars and advanced students of Arabic language and linguistics who wish to study the complexities of language change and lexical expansion.

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front cover of The Zephyrs of Najd
The Zephyrs of Najd
The Poetics of Nostalgia in The Classical Arabic Nasib
Jaroslav Stetkevych
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, Jaroslav Stetkevych attempts in this book to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.

Stetkevych concentrates on the "places of lost bliss" that furnish the dominant motif in the lyric-elegiac opening section (nasib) of the classic Arab code, or qusidah. In defining the Arabic lyrical genre, he shows how pre-Islamic lamentations over abandoned campsites evolved, in Arabo-Islamic mystical poetry, into expressions of spiritual nostalgia. Stetkevych also draws intriguing parallels between the highlands of Najd in Arabic poetry and Arcadia in the European tradition. He concludes by exploring the degree to which the pastoral-paradisiacal archetype of the nasib pervades Arabic literary perception, from the pre-Islamic ode through the Thousand and One Nights and later texts.

Enhanced by Stetkevych's sensitive translations of all the Arabic texts discussed, The Zephyrs of Najd brings the classical Arabic ode fully into the purview of contemporary literary and critical discourse.
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