Sometimes people motivate you, sometimes they challenge you, sometimes they inspire you, and sometimes they do all three at once. Ruqaiya Hasan falls into the last category. It is impossible to capture the huge impact that her work has had and will continue to have on a wide range of people and areas of research. In this volume, we attempt to show just a small snapshot of her impact on the study of verbal art.

On Verbal Art reflects on and celebrates the contribution that Professor Ruqaiya Hasan made to research on linguistic approaches to verbal art and includes contributions by scholars from around the world. The volume gathers together researchers with different perspectives, different views and different approaches to verbal art and aims to provide an inspiration to others to continue the work that Hasan began.

One of the lasting insights emerging from Hasan’s work on verbal art is the extent to which it informs analysis and theory. This volume brings together chapters that offer a detailed account of Hasan’s contribution to the study of verbal art, chapters that pay tribute to Hasan by adopting some of her central notions such as foregrounding, symbolic articulation, theme and secondary semiosis to inform their analyses, chapters that take Hasan’s thinking as a starting point to explore new methodological approaches for the investigation of verbal art, and finally chapters by scholars who are new to Hasanian thinking and afford fresh perspectives that build bridges to related approaches.

It is also hoped that this volume will encourage new research and promote the reading or re-reading of Hasan’s tremendous work in this area. We look forward to new challenges, arguments, extensions and applications.