This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis («recognition»), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern.

The Editors: Philip F. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry (1997) and of Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (2005). He has edited two volumes of essays on aspects of medieval Arabic literature, and he is completing a monograph on anagnorisis in the Arabic and Islamic narrative tradition. Marilyn Lawrence writes on literature and the performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her publications include Performing Medieval Narrative (with Evelyn Birge Vitz and Nancy Freeman Regalado, 2005). She holds a B.A. from Princeton and a Ph.D. from New York University, where she is Visiting Scholar in the French Department.