Featuring contributions from leading scholars of Iranian studies and / or comparative literature, this edited comprehensive and critical edited collection provides detailed scholarly analysis of Hedayat's life and work using a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches.
Hedayat is the author of The Blind Owl, the most famous Persian novel both in Iran and in Europe and America. Many of his short stories are in a critical realist style and are regarded as among some of the best written in twentieth century Iran. But his most original contribution was the use of modernist, more often surrealist, techniques in Persian fiction. Thus, he was not only a great writer, but also the founder of modernism in Persian fiction.
Yet both Hedayat’s life and his death came to symbolize much more than leading writers would normally claim. He still towers over modern Persian fiction and will remain a highly controversial figure so long as the clash of the modern and the traditional, the Persian and the European, and the religious and the secular, has not led to a synthesis and a consensus.
Dedication
Preface
Introduction: The Wondrous World of Sadeq Hedayat
HOMA KATOUZIAN
Sadeq Hedayat’s Centenary: Report of Events, and Personal Recollections
JAHANGIR HEDAYAT
Sadeq Hedayat and the Classics: The Case of The Blind Owl
MARTA SIMIDCHIEVA
The Blind Owl: Present in the Past or the Story of a Dream
HOURA YAVARI
Influence as Debt
MICAHEL BEARD
The Blind Owl and the Sound and the Fury
BHARAM MEGHDADI
Women in Hedayat’s Fiction
HOMA KATOUZIAN
Satire in Hajji Aqa
FIROUZEH KHAZRAI
Hedayat’s Translations of Kafka and the Logic of Iranian Modernity
NASRIN RAHIMIEH
Narrative Identity in the Works of Hedayat’s and His Contemporaries
or
MOHAMAD TAVAKOLI-TARGHI
Hedayat and the Experience of Modernity
RAMIN JAHANBEGLOO
Hedayat, Vegetarianism and Modernity
HUSHANG PHILSOOF
Man and Animal in Hedayat’s Stray Dog
HOMA KATOUZIAN
Biography
Homa Katouzian is a social scientist, historian, literary critic and poet. He is The Iran Heritage Foundation Research Fellow, St. Antony’s College and Member, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, and editor of Iranian Studies, Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies.
"This collection with its various approaches to the texts, the person and his ‘wondrous world’, his views, independence and interdependencies is a publication most apt to quicken the appetite." - Madeleine Voegeli; Middle Eastern Literatures: incorporating Edebiyat, 13:1, 117-119 (2012).
