ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines key texts of French, Chinese and Arabic literary history in which allegorizers, commentators, scholars and other sorts of readers remake lyric poetry into narrative or elide the lyric moment so that the text not only means something else, but becomes something else. It presents a new narrative of the poet's career that suggests that his brilliant reformulation of French poetry and language itself is due in part to an uncanny de-Orientalizing of the French reception of Chinese and other East Asian cultures. The book argues that traditional Muslim commentators are misleading in their zeal to fill in the narrative gaps of the Qur'an while Orientalist scholars are mistaken in their belief that the Qur'an is an aesthetic failure on its own terms.
