8vo. viii, 224 pp of German Text including 2 pp summary in English, 2 pp of Arabic text (summary), [2], publisher’s original wrappers, UNOPENED, small tear to top margin of half title page, otherwise copy clean & in very good condition, Beiruter Text Und Studien Band 45, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart & Beirut, first edition, 1992.

Synopsis

This study examines several late medieval Arabic literary texts such as the voluminous work by an- Nuwairi al-Iskandarani (d. after 776/1374) Kitab al- Ilmam which describes the attack on and the brief occupation of Alexandria by the Christian King of Cyprus Peter Iin 767/1365, in addition to royal biographies by two authors Badr ad-din al-Aini and Ibn Abi Hagala. All the texts share common characteristics whereby they deliberately contain little factual knowledge about their subject with other themes, drawn from Adab and historiographical works prevailing instead. The author maintains that such mixture is not a careless melange of genres but rather the deliberate production of literary systems that generate their own text-forms.