The History of Literary Theory in Medieval Arabo-Islamic Cultures

As taught today in North American and European classrooms, world literature remains heavily inflected by the norms of Euro-American literary theories. Yet the postcolonial turn has revealed the inadequacy of exclusively Eurocentric
approaches to non-European literary cultures. Non-European texts have been internalised within the structure of comparative and world literature. But what of those literary theories that have informed the production and reception of non-European texts for millennia? Demands to further decolonise the canon along conceptual lines should be heeded. By returning Euro-American readers, teachers, and students to the rhetorical dimensions of these non-European literary texts, we can extend the horizons of cross-cultural poetics. This new approach to non-European literary texts has the potential to decolonise the canon, both conceptually and methodologically; it may also revitalise and democratise world and comparative literature pedagogies in a range of classroom contexts.