Thus Spoke the Author

Abstract

A defining feature of premodern Arabic literature is the practice of recycling textual snippets and repurposing them in new contexts. Studying the different purposes underlying this practice promises to expand our understanding not only of how texts are interlinked, but also of how authors relied on text reuse to promote their own work. This article teases out the logic of an instance of self-promotional text reuse through association and allusion in an adab anthology, Ibn Nubāta al-Miṣrī’s (d. 768/1366) Maṭlaʿ al-fawāʾid wa-majmaʿ al-farāʾid (The appearance of the useful and the collection of the unique). Situating this anthology in its contemporary context of literary and historiographical writing, I argue that Ibn Nubāta’s genre-specific self-citational practices constitute a subset of text reuse with wider implications for our understanding of authorial self-promotion in the Mamluk period.