Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Myth and Poetics)

An astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Srat Ban Hill has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide a context for social interaction and commentary.