تطور الشعر السواحيلي

Abstract EN

There is an extended conflict between two trends.

Supporters of the first trend regard that the literary text just as cause and effect, and its meanings must be disclosed by linking it to its external context.

The social method, the historical method and the psychological method enter in this area.

And the second trend tries to study the literary text by means of full attention of internal linguistic structure.

Change in literature is affected from within the text (intra-textually) or is triggered from outside the text (extra-textually).

The intra-textual approach to change in literature is associated with literary methods of “formalism” and “structuralism”.

In this study however, we recognize the inadequacy of paying full attention to the inner linguistic structure of a generic form, at the expense of ideas, tropes, imagery, themes and characters.

The insistence of any probe into the inner mechanism of the structure only, is not always adequate, especially in a study like this one which considers tropes, imagery, characters, history, themes etc.

The aim of this study there is twofold.

First, to establish the change that took place in the Swahili poetry-both thematically and formally.

Second, to try to find a correlation between the change that takes place in the Swahili poetry and the societal concomitants that may have certain influence in the thematic and stylistic shift of the Swahili poetry.