Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 37 - Imaginative Geographies in the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters

  • from Part VII - Scales, Polysystems, Canons
  • Edited by Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of World Literature
    Published online:
    17 August 2021
    Print publication:
    09 September 2021, pp 730-748

  • Summary

    This contribution prepares for a lengthy study of imaginative geography, and its metanarrative as an empowering narrative strategy. The classical and medieval Arab-Islamic geographer was not necessarily a geographer per se. Philologists often use their knowledge of space to construct a wide ranging inquiry that happened to serve generations of geographers. A close reading in a number of explanatory commentaries and marginalia helps to perceive the turns and fluctuations in geographic genealogies in relation to lands outside the Islamic core. The self-conscious geographer needs not only to define method or mode, but also to vindicate a departure, and claim or deny antecedent authority and source material. A republic of letters finds substantiation and root in these insights, and explanations, and complements other explorations in compendiums, encyclopedic knowledge, and literary or broad cultural exchange.