Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan endeavors to elucidate the mechanisms by which a growing number of men and women of all social strata became involved in acquiring knowledge and skills during the Tokugawa period.
Although the Arabic maqamah, a branch of the picaresque genre, was much cultivated in the Middle Ages, little is known about it aside from the works of al-Hamadhani and al-hariri, its first two cultivators.