Atlas Trail
Rogues, Quatrains and Linked Verse: A World Tour of Genre and Form
Six new stops across genres and forms literary history keeps close at hand but rarely maps together: an Arabic con man's rhymed prose, a Spanish orphan's picaresque road, a Persian astronomer's disputed quatrains, an Italian epic stanza turned to comedy by Byron, a Japanese chain poem that gave birth to haiku, and the founding argument over where the historical novel begins.
Stop 1 of 6.
Genres
An Arabic rogue's rhymed prose, invented by al-Hamadhani around 990.
Stop 2 of 6.
Genres
Its structural cousin five centuries later, born from one anonymous Spanish novella.
Stop 3 of 6.
Forms
A Persian quatrain form whose most famous English version may be more FitzGerald than Khayyam.
Stop 4 of 6.
Forms
Boccaccio's epic stanza, later turned to comedy by Byron.
Stop 5 of 6.
Forms
A poem with no single author, whose own opening stanza broke away to become haiku.
Stop 6 of 6.
Genres
Scott's anonymous Waverley, and the honest dissent over whether it was really first.
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