Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition: Discovery, Deliverance and Delusion

The first study to analyse the recognition scene in the Arabic narrative tradition
Winner of the 2019 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the category Arab Culture in Other Languages

According to Aristotle, a well-crafted recognition scene is one of the basic constituents of a successful narrative. It is the point when hidden facts and identities come to light—in the classic instance, a son discovers in horror that his wife is his mother and his children are his siblings. Aristotle coined the term ‘anagnôrisis’ for the concept. In this book Philip F. Kennedy shows how 'recognition' is key to an understanding of how one reads values and meaning into, or out of, a story. He analyses texts and motifs fundamental to the Arabic literary tradition in five case studies: the Qur’an; the biography of Muhammad; Joseph in classical and medieval re-tellings; the ‘deliverance from adversity’ genre and picaresque narratives.

Key Features

• Offers new vistas for reading, understanding and interpreting Arabic literature as well as the culture in which it was produced
• Provides a comparative perspective, appealing to students of narrative literature across linguistic, regional and cultural traditions
• Highlights the importance of intertextuality, showing the various ways in which literature and other genres of writing must be read together as manifestations of one complex cultural narrative
• Demonstrates the fruitfulness of interdisciplinarity in literary studies