Canons, Thefts, and Palimpsests in the Arabic Literary Tradition

This chapter explores the navigational space utilized by poets and novelists who are bent on an appealing production that can earn them the right as new hosts of precursors’ themes and expressions and thus to be thought of as writers of distinctive merit. While philologists and literary critics are on the watch to uncover infringements, the new intertext is often a dense textual engagement driven by a desire for something desired by another. This principle means that there are works that set a standard for the host who would like to own or surpass them. A struggle creates a combative arena where players devise innovations and inventions that strive to escape the strict applications of the canon. This chapter introduces the major tenth-century critics and their perspective on language and its transformation from the uncouth to the refined, as shown in poetry and poetics, where a grounding for a large intertext rests on precursors’s texts that serve now as palimpsests, an almost unrecognized basal source.