Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Description

Persian Literature and Modernity recasts the history of modern literature in Iran by elucidating the bonds between the classical tradition and modernity and exploring textual, generic and discursive formations through heterodoxical investigations. This is first done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition, including the munāzirah (debate), Ahrīman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical aloneness) and nāriz̤āyatī (discontent). Following this are broader structural and processual treatments, including the emergence of the genre of the social novel, the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse in Iran. Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, the chapters in this volume make a case for stepping outside the bounds of orthodox literary scholarship in Iranian studies with its associated political and orientalist determinants in order to provide a more nuanced conception of literary modernity in Iran. Offering an alternative reading of modernity in Persian literature, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in the history of modern Iran and Persian Literature Cover Half Title Series Page Title Copyright Contents List of figures Contributors 1 Introduction PART 1 2 Rival texts: modern Persian prose fiction and the myth of the founding father 3 Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran: ʿAlavī and Hidāyat 4 Linguistic realism and modernity: the ontology of the poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib 5 A predestined break from the past: Shiʿr-i Naw, history, and hermeneutics PART 2 6 Intimating Tehran: the figure of the prostitute in Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s 7 Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow 8 Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive Index