Wen-chin Ouyang 
Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic Islamic Culture [PDF ebook] 
The Making of a Tradition

For the first time this book provides an examination of the impulses that went into the making of literary criticism in medieval Arab-Islamic culture. It traces the resulting characteristics of this area of intellectual enquiry and grounds the field of Arabic literary criticism in its social, intellectual and cultural context (3rd/9th century to the 5th/11th century).