Comprised of contributions from leading international scholars, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry incorporates political, cultural, and theoretical paradigms that help place poetic projects in their socio-political contexts as well as illuminate connections across the continuum of the Arabic tradition. This volume grounds itself in the present moment and, from it, examines the transformations of the fifteen-century Arabic poetic tradition through readings, re-readings, translations, reformulations, and co-optations. Furthermore, this collection aims to deconstruct the artificial modern/pre-modern divide and to present the Arabic poetic practice as live and urgent, shaped by the experiences and challenges of the twenty-first century and at the same time in constant conversation with its long tradition. The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry actively seeks to destabilize binaries such as that of East-West in contributions that shed light on the interactions of the Arabic tradition with other Middle Eastern traditions, such as Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew, and on South-South ideological and poetic networks of solidarity that have informed poetic currents across the modern Middle East. This volume will be ideal for scholars and students of Arabic, Middle Eastern, and comparative literature, as well as non-specialists interested in poetry and in the present moment of the study of Arabic poetry.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her work focuses on modernist movements or trends in Arabic poetry and their relationship to the Arabic literary tradition. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (2017), The Sky That Denied Me (2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (2021). She is the Coeditor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, USA. She is a specialist in Classical Arabic poetry. Her books include: Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ‘Abbāsid Age (1991); The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (1993, paperback 2011); The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (2002); The Mantle Odes: Arabic Praise Poems to the Prophet Muḥammad (2010) and The Cooing of the Dove and the Cawing of the Crow : Late ʿ Abbāsid Poetics in Abūal-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Saqṭ al-Zand and Luzūm Mā Lā Yalzam (2023). She serves as Executive Editor of the Brill Studies in Middle East Literatures monograph series.