出版社：Middle East Documentation Center (MEDOC), University of Chicago
摘要：We live in hard times for pioneers and discoverers. There are no more blank spots on the map of our globe, there are no undiscovered continents, no unexplored jungles, and no unknown tribes to be found. But still there is Mamluk literature. Despite several remarkable efforts in recent years—especially volume 7 [no. 1] of Mamlu≠k Studies Review, which was devoted entirely to Mamluk literature—the state of the art of Mamluk literature is, in a word, deplorable. There is no comprehensive and reliable overview of the literature as a whole, many crucial texts still remain unedited, and monographs on Mamluk poets or the most important genres of Mamluk literature are lacking almost altogether, and so it is not easy even today to determine who were the most important literati or even which books were the most characteristic, influential, and important. What we see is an enormous contrast between a flourishing literary culture on the one hand and a remarkable dearth of scholarly enterprises dealing with that culture on the other. In fact, it seems as if no other field in the realm of Arabic studies has been neglected as much as that of Arabic literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. Not even the increasing interest in the Mamluk period witnessed in the last decades has been enough to ensure a lasting effect on the study of Mamluk literature so far. This state of affairs requires an explanation, since thinking today about the reasons for the actual plight of the study of Mamluk literature will be helpful, I hope, in determining what has to be done in the future. I want to start with a couple of rather general and theoretical considerations before I then examine recent achievements in the various fields of literature
