Book Talk with Matthew L. Keegan
Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Ḥarīrī in an Age of Commentary
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 | 3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.
Rubenstein Commons | Meeting Room 5

Matthew L. Keegan, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow Member (2024–25) in the School of Historical Studies, will present on his new book Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Ḥarīrī in an Age of Commentary. The book offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster stories written in an elaborate and highly allusive form of prose. Keegan shows how the emergence of world literature as a literary critical paradigm led to a wholesale reformulation of literary tastes that sidelined elaborately referential texts like the Maqāmāt. Restoring the Maqāmāt to its place as the pinnacle of Arabic style and as an essential text of Islamic education for centuries, Before World Literature offers a model of how to read texts like the Maqāmāt on their own terms.

Before World Literature is available for sale through University of Pennsylvania Press. Penn Press is offering the code PENN-MKEEGAN30 to receive a 30% discount off the purchase of the book. 

If you are ordering from outside of the Americas, the Mare Nostrum Group is offering the code CSPENN30 to receive a 30% discount off the purchase of the book.

This event will be livestreamed. Please register below to attend in-person or to receive a link to the livestream.