1st Edition
Persian Literature and Modernity Production and Reception
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.
1. Introduction Hamid Rezaei Yazdi & Arshavez Mozafari
PART 1
2. Rival Texts: Modern Persian Prose Fiction and the Myth of the Founding Father Hamid Rezaei Yazdi
3. Reactionary Interbellum Literature and the Demonic: ʿAlavī and Hidāyat Arshavez Mozafari
4. Linguistic Realism and Modernity: The Ontology of the Poetic from Suhrawardī to Sòāʾib Henry M. Bowles
5. A Predestined Break from the Past: Shiʾr-i Naw, History and Hermeneutics Fateme Montazeri
PART 2
6. Intimating Tehran: The Figure of the Prostitute in Iranian Popular Literature, 1920s–1970s Jairan Gahan
7. Classical Persian Canons of the Revolutionary Press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s Circles in Istanbul and Moscow Samuel Hodgkin
8. Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and Modernity’s Anthropological Drive Parisa Vaziri
Biography
Hamid Rezaei Yazdi is an educator and researcher in the field of Middle Eastern studies, with an emphasis on the historiography of modern Iran. He received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and is currently a Professor at the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College.
Arshavez Mozafari is a historian of modern Iran based in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.
