Abstract
The Arab literary establishment of the period immediately preceding the nineteenth century had reached such stability in social status, such homogeneity in education, and such unanimity in cultural values that it was no longer searching for innovative ideas, and of its men of letters—poets and prose writers alike—it expected not originality but consummate skill in the use of words. The prose that it favoured was not only rhymed, but laden with tropes, especially those developed in the branch of Rhetoric known asbadī, which concerns itself not so much with imagery as with verbal artifices2(such as the paronomasia, the double entendre, the palindrome) of which by then over 150 varieties had been devised.
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