A Study of the Term "Al Rawnak" in Ancient Arab Criticism

This paper aims to study the term "Al Rawnak", a term used in ancient Arab criticism, exploring its linguistic roots, its lexical definition, its denotations in dictionaries, and mapping out its usage in the varying contexts of ancient Arab criticism books, with the objective to pin down the meaning of the term and to trace its development.
The study then examines terms often associated with the term "Al Rawnak" like "Al Maa'", "Al Talawah", "Al Bahaa'", "Al Safaa'", etc. Together with "Al Rawnak", these terms were often used to describe the beauty and uniqueness of Arab poetry and prose. The paper also discusses the inconveniences of the term which helped narrow its scope in ancient times and limit its chance of being used in modern criticism such as its inflexibility and the inaccuracy of some of its features.
Finally, this study links "Al Rawnak", in some of its aspects, to a rather modern critical term which is "poetic diction" aiming to shed more light on the concept and some of the problems related to it.