Professor Monroe works in the areas of lyric poetry, the Middle Ages, and East-West relations with particular interest in the importance of the Arab-contribution to Spanish civilization.
Monroe also reviews these works in terms of their literary origin and social context with regard to the evolving national consciousness of Spain, i.e., how the self-reflective nature of the issues addressed in these studies develops over the course of several centuries.
Such a survey is particularly resonant with subtleties because of the eight hundred year presence of Arabic-speaking Muslim states in Spain, chiefly in the central and southern regions.
Among figures discussed: Francisco Javier Simonet (III); Francisco Codera y Zaidín (V); Julián Ribera y Tarragó (VI); Miguel Asín Palacios (VII); Emilio García Gómez and Angel González Palencia (VIII); Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and Américo Castro (X).
Monroe notes that here Ibn Shuhayd "developed a metaphysics into an aesthetics to account for the origin of beauty and the creative process in Arabic literature.
In his sixty-page introduction Monroe seeks to situate the poets within the political and social environment, following poetry's fortunes over several centuries in the culture of al-Andalus.
This form employs a combination of poetry and prose, in which often a wandering vagabond makes his living on the gifts his listeners give him following his extemporaneous displays of rhetoric, erudition, or verse, often done with a trickster's touch.
The Muslims of Spain (al-Andalus) were connected closely and directly with al-Maghrib, i.e., with those who later continued the music traditions of Andalus following the Spanish reconquista.
[8] The authors note that evidence of a "zealous guardianship of a venerable tradition... makes it conceivable that the Andalusian music we hear today does not differ radically from what we might have heard in medieval Andalus.
About Saraqusti's collection of Maqamat, Monroe (at 108) comments on the difficulty to render it into a foreign language, as it is "a work studded with puns, rhymes, and double entendres."
[14] "Ibn Shuhaid proposed the refreshing doctrine that poets are born not made, that the ability to write good poetry is a gift from God.