Poetry of Hilla in Imad al-Din al-Isfahani's "Kharidat al-Qasr wa Jaridat al-'Asr": A Stylistic Study

Abstract

This research aims to study the stylistic structure of selected poems by the princes of the Banu Mazyad dynasty, as presented by Imad al-Din al-Isfahani in his book "Kharidat al-Qasr wa Jaridat al-'Asr," within its political and cultural context in the city of Hilla. The research is based on the premise that style is a reflection of the poet's self and vision, and that stylistics is one of the most important approaches to reading literary texts in modern Arabic criticism. It allows the researcher to access the worlds of the text and uncover the complex relationship between the poet's personality at the moment of creation and their linguistic expression.

The research adopts a stylistic approach based on the analysis of major stylistic phenomena, such as deviation, parallelism, repetition, rhythmic structure, and poetic imagery, at three levels: phonetic, syntactic, and semantic. The analysis was horizontal, with the poetic styles of the Banu Mazyad poets intersecting at each level, rather than vertical, separating one poet from another. This horizontal approach aimed to extract general characteristics prevalent among the Banu Mazyad poetic group.

The research concluded that the stylistic structure in the poetry of the Banu Mazyad princes was not an isolated linguistic construct, but rather an expression of the nature of the poetic experience and its connection to its political and cultural circumstances. This gave the texts their artistic distinctiveness and contributed to revealing their inherent aesthetic dimensions.