Karla Mallette's Books

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

A Literary History

By: Karla Mallette

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The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

A Literary History

By: Karla Mallette

When Muslim invaders conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they took control of a weakened Greek state in cultural decadence. When, two centuries later, the Normans seized control of the island, they found a Muslim state just entering its cultural prime. Rather than replace the practices and idioms of the vanquished people with their own, the Normans in Sicily adopted and adapted the Greco-Arabic culture that had developed on the island. Yet less than a hundred years later, the cultural and linguistic mix had been reduced, a Romance tradition had come to dominate, and Sicilian poets composed the first body of love lyrics in an Italianate vernacular. Karla Mallette has written the first literary history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Where other scholars have separated out the island's literature along linguistic grounds, Mallette surveys the literary production in Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Romance dialects, in addition to the architectural remains, numismatic inscriptions, and diplomatic records, to argue for a multilingual, multicultural, and coherent literary tradition. Drawing on postcolonial theory to consider institutional and intellectual power, the exchange of knowledge across cultural boundaries, and the containment and celebration of the other that accompanies cultural transition, the book includes an extensive selection of poems and documents translated from the Arabic, Latin, Old French, and Italian. The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250 opens up new venues for understanding the complexity of a place and culture at the crossroads of East and West, Islam and Christianity, tradition and innovation.

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222

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812204794

ISBN 13

9780812204797

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism

By: Karla Mallette

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European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism

By: Karla Mallette

Over the past decade, scholars have vigorously reconsidered the history of Orientalism, and though Edward Said's hugely influential work remains a touchstone of the discussion, Karla Mallette notes, it can no longer be taken as the final word on Western perceptions of the Islamic East. The French and British Orientalisms that Said studied in particular were shaped by the French and British colonial projects in Muslim regions; nations that did not have such investments in the Middle East generated significantly different perceptions of Islamic and Arabic culture. European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean examines Orientalist philological scholarship of southern Europe produced between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. In Italy, Spain, and Malta, Mallette argues, a regional history of Arab occupation during the Middle Ages gave scholars a focus different from that of their northern European colleagues; in studying the Arab world, they were not so much looking on a distant and radically different history as seeking to reconstruct the past of their own nations. She demonstrates that in specific instances, Orientalists wrote their nations' Arab history as the origin of modern national identity, depicting Islamic thought not as exterior to European modernity but rather as formative of and central to it. Joining comparative insights to the analytic strategies and historical genius of philology, Mallette ranges from the complex manuscript history of the Thousand and One Nights to the invention of the Maltese language and Spanish scholarship on Dante and Islam. Throughout, she reveals the profound influences Arab and Islamic traditions have had on the development of modern European culture. European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean is an engaging study that sheds new light on the history of Orientalism, the future of philology, and the postcolonial Middle Ages.

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321

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081220526X

ISBN 13

9780812205268

Lives of the Great Languages

Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

By: Karla Mallette

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Lives of the Great Languages

Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

By: Karla Mallette

Part I: Group Portrait with Language -- Chapter 1: A Poetics of the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 2: My Tongue -- Chapter 3: A Cat May Look at a King -- Part II: Space, Place, and the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 4: Territory / Frontiers / Routes -- Chapter 5: Tracks -- Chapter 6: Tribal Rugs -- Part III: Translation and Time -- Chapter 7: The Soul of a New Language -- Chapter 8: On First Looking into Mattā's Aristotle -- Chapter 9: "I Became a Fable" -- Chapter 10: A Spy in the House of Language -- Part IV: Beyond the Cosmopolitan Language -- Chapter 11: Silence -- Chapter 12: The Shadow of Latinity -- Chapter 13: Life Writing.

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249

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022679606X

ISBN 13

9780226796062

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

A Literary History

By: Karla Mallette

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The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

A Literary History

By: Karla Mallette

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Page Count

222

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812204794

ISBN 13

9780812204797

Lives of the Great Languages

Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

By: Karla Mallette

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Lives of the Great Languages

Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean

By: Karla Mallette

The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters. In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.

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249

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022679623X

ISBN 13

9780226796239

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism

By: Karla Mallette

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European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism

By: Karla Mallette

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

321

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

081220526X

ISBN 13

9780812205268

Book's by Karla Mallette

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

Lives of the Great Languages

Lives of the Great Languages

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250

Lives of the Great Languages

Lives of the Great Languages

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean

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