ABSTRACT
The previous chapter has explored figures that enhance the dramaturgy of passages without playing a predominant role themselves. The opposite is true for some episodes in which a theme serves as a mere prop for an arrangement of figures and tropes. These create an abstract fantastic action that is initially removed from and eventually inverts the depicted reality. The shift of focus from depicting an (often highly conventionalized) reality to developing existing motifs of poetry, characterizes muḥdath poetry in general and rightly deserves the name of mannerism, which Wolfhart Heinrichs and later Stefan Sperl applied to it.1
