THE HOMELAND AT THE THRESHOLD OF WORLD LITERATURE

This chapter investigates the moral-affective shift in the representation of love of homeland that took place in Arabic poetry over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through an examination of indicative samples from prominent poets. The nature of this shift provides a perspective on the process through which the formerly court-centered Arabic poetry was transformed into the central component of a national literature. The classical poetic image of the homeland as an unrecoverable place and time of youthful love was displaced by the image of the homeland as the manifestation of life and nature that is both external and internal to the self. The new image linked the aesthetic values of world literature with the animating force of national agency, thereby conferring a new social authority on poetry and art.