The Anthologist

"The Anthologist" captures all the warmth, wit, and extraordinary prose stylethat have made Baker--a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author--anAmerican master.

This book is a direct window onto the workshop of Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (350–429/961–1039), an anthologist from the second half of the fourth/tenth century, and focuses on the making of his magnum opus, Yatīmat al-dahr, and its sequel, Tatimmat al-Yatīma.

Edition, translation and full critical study of a hitherto marginalised text, bringing it to full attention for the first time.

A theoretical, historical, and critical inquiry, this book looks at the assumptions anthologies are predicated on, how they are put together, the treatment of the poems in them, and the effects their presentations have on their readers.

Among the numerous discursive carriers through which translations come into being, are channeled and gain readership, translation anthologies and collections have so far received little attention among translation scholars: either they are let aside as almost ungraspable categories, astride editing and translating, mixing in most variable ways authors, genres, languages or cultures, or are taken as convenient but rather meaningless groupings of single translations. This volume takes a new stand, makes a plea to consider translation anthologies and collections at face value and offers an extensive discussion about the more salient aspects of translation anthologies and collections: their complex discursive properties, their manifold roles in canonization processes and in strategies of cultural censorship. It brings together translation scholars with different backgrounds, both theoretical and historical, and covering a wide array of European cultural areas and linguistic traditions. Of special interest for translation theoreticians and historians as well as for scholars in literary and cultural studies, comparative literature and transfer studies.

Critical Forms is an account of the generic forms in which literary criticism has been undertaken. It examines chiefly Anglophone literary criticism, with comparative discussion of French and German material, from around 1750 to the present and examines prefaces, selections and anthologies, reviews, lectures, dialogues, letters, and life-writing. Though not intended to be an exhaustive history of the period, Critical Forms begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the emergence of something like the forms (chiefly, the essay and the treatise) in which criticism is still predominantly practised. In order at least to complicate this predominance, the book documents an abiding plurality in the forms of literary critical writing in the subsequent period, leading up to the present. Ross Wilson both questions the status of the essay and treatise as the 'natural' forms of literary criticism and shows that the history of literary criticism is much more formally various and innovative than the usual ways of recounting that history as a succession of schools and movements would allow. Critical Forms harbours the hope that it will make available a wider array of forms for the practice of literary criticism today; it is this hope that licenses its own experiments in critical form.

The aim of this volume is to raise and discuss questions about the different approaches to the study of pre-modern Arabic anthologies from the perspectives of philology, religion, history, geography, and literature.