Comparative Literature And Classical Persian Poetics

Reprint of a classic text, this volume gives an insight into the rebirth of national literature in the national language and traces the course of its development and full maturity from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century.

Employing contemporary literary theory, eight members of the "Chicago school" of Arabic and Persian literature reorient the critical approach to classical Middle Eastern literature. The authors analyze a broad spectrum of poetry, ranging from the pre-Islamic ode of the sixth century to seventeenth-century Persian Safavid Moghul verse. Among issues considered are the ritual and sacrificial aspects of literature, the transition from orality to literacy, the iconographical and mythic dimensions of philology, and imitation as a form of creation. The inclusion of contemporary translations of all the poems discussed is an important feature for students of Middle Eastern literature and comparative poetics.

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.

A masterpiece of Persian Classical epic, the Shahnama or Book of Kings was composed by Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi at the beginning of the eleventh century. Because the Shahnama presents itself as a chronicle of the reigns of the shahs from the primordial founders to the Sasanian dynasty which ended in 651, scholarly attention has centered on the question of its historical accuracy. Addressing the literary as well as the historical and mythological aspects of the Shahnama, Olga M. Davidson makes this centerpiece of Iranian culture accessible to Western readers. Drawing on recent work in epic studies and oral poetics, Davidson considers analogies with Classical and medieval European narratives as she investigates the poem's social contexts. Her interpretation of the Shahnama focuses on both the figure of the poet himself and on his protagonists-the superhuman hero Rostam and the historical or historicized shahs. Exploring the Shahnama as an example of court poetry designed to glorify the idea of empire, Davidson identifies as a driving force of Ferdowsi's narrative a strong current of antagonism between king and hero. Ironically, she shows, it is the epic hero himself who poses the greatest threat to the concept of kingship that he is sworn to defend. Poet and Hero in the Persian Book of Kings will be welcomed by readers working in such fields as comparative literature, Middle Eastern Studies, folklore, literary theory, and comparative religion.

The first English-language study of the Persian prison poem Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia. The emergence of the genre is indebted to the increasing importance of the poet, who came into increasing conflict with Ghaznavid and Saljuq sovereigns as the genre developed. Uniting the polarities of perpetuity and contingency, the poet's body became the medium for the prison poem's oppositional poetics. Bringing theorists as wide ranging as Kantorowicz, Benjamin and Adorno into conversation with classical Persian poetics, this book offers an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity, and of premodern Persianate culture within the framework of world literature and global politics. Key Features - Develops a new approach to genre based on the political status of the prison poem - Offers an unprecedented account of the interrelations of poetry and power in premodern literature - Sheds new light on Muslim-Christian relations by documenting the multi-confessional orientation of many prison poems - Relates the trajectory of the prison poem genre in premodern poetics to Iranian literary modernism, including the prison poems of Muhammad Taqi Bahar Rebecca Ruth Gould is Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful English (2021) and Cityscapes (2019), the monograph Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020).

First published in 1958, this work by one of Britain’s most celebrated Orientalist scholars, tells the story of the rebirth of national literature in Persia after the fall of the Sᾱsᾱnian empire in the seventh century. It traces the course of this literature’s development and full maturity from the ninth century to the end of the fifteenth century and looks at a number of important writers including the Saljῡq poets, Rῡmῑ, ῌᾱfiz and Jᾱmῑ. This work will be of interest to those studying Persian and Middle-Eastern literature and history.

Focuses on the poems rather than on their authors. Surveys the development of Persian mystical poetry, dealing first with the relation between Sufism and literature and then with the four main genres of the tradition: the epigram, the homiletic poem, love poetry and symbolic narrative.

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

Comprehensive treatment of the influence of Persian poetry upon English & American literature. Contains a definitive bibliography.