Contents -- Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Elegy and the Confrontation of Death in Arabic Poetry -- One Size Fits All -- Notes On Abu Tammam's Elegy Kadha fa- l- yajilla l- khatbu -- Dead Garments, Poor Nobles, and a Handsome Youth: Notes on a Poem by al- Sanawbari -- Loss Written in Stone: Ibn Shuhayd's Ritha' for Cordoba and Its Place in the Arabic Elegiac Tradition -- Arabic Poetics and Representations of Women in the Andalusian Hebrew Lament -- Qasida, Marthiya, and Différance -- Revisiting Layla al-Akhyaliya's Trespass -- Writing About Life Through Loss: ' A'isha Taymur's Elegies and the Subversion of the Arabic Canon -- Sleep in Peace: Salah ' Abd Al-Sabur's Gentle Elegy on the Death of a Hero -- Historiography as Novel: Bensalem Himmich's al-' Allama -- Sonallah Ibrahim's Les années de Zeth, or The Exportability of Contemporary Arabic Literature -- Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf al-Qa'id, and the ' Mature' Arabic Novel -- The Anti-Romance Antidote: Revisiting Allegories of the Nation* -- Self-Portraits of the Other: Toward a Palestinian Poetics of Hebrew Verse* -- A List of Magda Al-Nowaihi's Publications.