2003 Reviews

Review of Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres and Criticism

Riedel, Dagmar A.

The pleasures of Arabic poetry would be lost on a reader who does not relish the subtleties of rhetoric. Roger Allen clearly relishes them. In the preface he recalls that most colleagues considered the writing of this work "intrinsically impossible or, at least, unwise" (p. x). The author humbly admits the daunting nature of a project that covers roughly 1500 years of Arabic literary history, and then graciously passes the buck to his critics.