Persian Literature as World Literature PDF Download

Author: Mostafa Abedinifard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501354205
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Confronting nationalistic and nativist interpreting practices in Persianate literary scholarship, Persian Literature as World Literature makes a case for reading these literatures as world literature-as transnational, worldly texts that expand beyond local and national penchants. Working through an idea of world literature that is both cosmopolitan and critical of any monologic view on globalization, the contributors to this volume revisit the early and contemporary circulation of Persianate literatures across neighboring and distant cultures, and seek innovative ways of developing a transnational Persian literary studies, engaging in constructive dialogues with the global forces surrounding, and shaping, Persianate societies and cultures.

Author: Hamid Dabashi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Humanism has mostly considered the question “What does it mean to be human?” from a Western perspective. Dabashi asks it anew from a non-European perspective, in a groundbreaking study of 1,400 years of Persian literary humanism. He presents the unfolding of this vast tradition as the creative and subversive subconscious of Islamic civilization.

Author: Hamid Dabashi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The Shahnameh, an epic poem recounting the foundation of Iran across mythical, heroic, and historical ages, is the beating heart of Persian literature and culture. Composed by Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi over a thirty-year period and completed in the year 1010, the epic has entertained generations of readers and profoundly shaped Persian culture, society, and politics. For a millennium, Iranian and Persian-speaking people around the globe have read, memorized, discussed, performed, adapted, and loved the poem. In this book, Hamid Dabashi brings the Shahnameh to renewed global attention, encapsulating a lifetime of learning and teaching the Persian epic for a new generation of readers. Dabashi insightfully traces the epic’s history, authorship, poetic significance, complicated legacy of political uses and abuses, and enduring significance in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In addition to explaining and celebrating what makes the Shahnameh such a distinctive literary work, he also considers the poem in the context of other epics, such as the Aeneid and the Odyssey, and critical debates about the concept of world literature. Arguing that Ferdowsi’s epic and its reception broached this idea long before nineteenth-century Western literary criticism, Dabashi makes a powerful case that we need to rethink the very notion of “world literature” in light of his reading of the Persian epic.

Author: Amirhossein Vafa
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319404695
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Reading literary and cinematic events between and beyond American and Persian literatures, this book questions the dominant geography of the East-West divide, which charts the global circulation of texts as World Literature. Beyond the limits of national literary historiography, and neocolonial cartography of world literary discourse, the minor character Parsee Fedallah in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) is a messenger who travels from the margins of the American literature canon to his Persian literary counterparts in contemporary Iranian fiction and film, above all, the rural woman Mergan in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s novel Missing Soluch (1980). In contention with Eurocentric treatments of world literatures, and in recognition of efforts to recast the worldliness of American and Persian literatures, this book maintains that aesthetic properties are embedded in their local histories and formative geographies.

Author: Omid Azadibougar
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 981151691X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book introduces the canonical figure Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951) and draws a comprehensive image of a major intellectual force in the context of both modern Persian Literature and World Literature. A prolific writer known for his magnum opus, The Blind Owl (1936), Hedayat established the use of common language for literary purposes, opened new horizons on imaginative literature and explored a variety of genres in his creative career. This book looks beyond the reductive critical tendencies that read a rich and diverse literary profile in light of Hedayat’s suicide, arguing instead that his literary imagination was not solely the result of genius but rather enriched by a vast network of the world’s literary traditions. This study reflects on Hedayat’s attempts at various genres of artistic creation, including painting, fiction writing, satire and scholarly research, as well as his persistent struggles for artistic authenticity, which transcended solidly established literary and artistic norms. Providing a critical reading of Hedayat’s work to untangle aspects of his writing – including reflections on science, religion, nationalism and coloniality – alongside his pioneering work on folk culture, and how humor informs his writings, this text offers a critical review of the status of Persian literature in the contemporary landscape of the world’s literary studies.

Author: Kevin L. Schwartz
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474450865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Integrating forgotten tales of literary communities across Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia - at a time when Islamic empires were fracturing and new state formations were emerging - this book offers a more global understanding of Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. It challenges the manner in which Iranian nationalism has infilitrated Persian literary history writing and recovers the multi-regional breadth and vibrancy of a global lingua franca connecting peoples and places across Islamic Eurasia. Focusing on 3 case studies (18th-century Isfahan, a small court in South India and the literary climate of the Anglo-Afghan war), it reveals the literary and cultural ties that bound this world together as well as some of the trends that broke it apart.

Author: Wali Ahmadi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134072775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
With the unleashing of the "War on Terror" in the aftermath of 9/11, Afghanistan has become prominent in the news. However, we need to appreciate that no substantive understanding of contemporary history, politics and society of this country can be achieved without a thorough analysis of the Afghan encounter with cultural and literary modernity and modernization. Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan does just that. The book offers a balanced and interdisciplinary analysis of the rich and admirable contemporary poetry and fiction of a land long tormented by wars and invasions. It sets out to demonstrate that, within the trajectory of the union between modern aesthetic imagination and politics, creativity and production, and representation and history, the modernist intervention enabled many contemporary poets and writers of fiction to resist the overt politicization of the literary field, without evading politics or disavowing the modern state. The interpretative moves and nuanced readings of a series of literary texts make this book a major contribution to a rather neglected area of research and study. Winner of the Iranian World Prize for Book of the Year in Islamics Studies 2009

Author: Hamid Rezaei Yazdi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429999615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book 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.

Author: Domenico Ingenito
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004435905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 717

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Book Description
In Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Domenico Ingenito explores the unstudied connections between eroticism, spirituality, and politics in the lyric poetry of 13th-century literary master Sa‘di Shirazi.

Author: Firdawsī
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780670034857
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 936

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Book Description
A new translation of the late-tenth-century Persian epic follows its story of pre-Islamic Iran's mythic time of Creation through the seventh-century Arab invasion, tracing ancient Persia's incorporation into an expanding Islamic empire. 15,000 first printing.