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Persian Literature and Modernity 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 fi rst done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition, including the m unāzirah (debate), Ahrīman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical aloneness) and n ā riz̤ā yatī (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. O ffering 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. Hamid Rezaei Yazdi is an educator and researcher in the fi eld 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 in 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. Iranian Studies Edited by: Homa Katouzian University of Oxford and Mohamad Tavakoli University of Toronto S ince 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a leading learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Iranian society, history, culture and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies. Gender and Dance in Iran Biopolitics on the Twentieth-Century Stage Ida Meftahi Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi Building an Ark Prashant Keshavmurthy Iran and the Nuclear Question History and the Evolutionary Trajectory Mohammad Homayounvash The True Dream An English Translation with Facing Persian Text Ali-Ashgar Seyed-Gohrab and Senn McGlinn Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution Family and Nation in Filmfarsi Pedram Partovi Persian Literature and Modernity Production and Reception Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari F or more information about this series, please visit: w ww.routledge.com/ middleeaststudies/series/IRST Persian Literature and Modernity Production and Reception Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari to be identifi ed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yazdi, Hamid Rezaei, editor. | Mozafari, Arshavez, editor. Title: Persian literature and modernity : production and reception / edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Iranian studies ; 37 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2018038230 (print) | LCCN 2018054408 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429505348 (master) | ISBN 9780429999628 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9780429999611 (Epub) | ISBN 9780429999604 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9781138585331 | ISBN 9781138585331(hardback) | ISBN 9780429505348(ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Persian literature—1796—History and criticism. Classifi cation: LCC PK6406 (ebook) | LCC PK6406 .P47 2019 (print) | DDC 891/.55409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038230 ISBN: 978-1-138-58533-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50534-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents List of fi gures vii Contributors viii 1 Introduction 1 H AMID REZAEI YAZDI AND ARSHAVEZ MOZAFARI PART 1 2 Rival texts: modern Persian prose fi ction and the myth of the founding father 25 HAMID REZAEI YAZDI 3 Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran: ʿAlavī and Hidāyat 85 ARSHAVEZ MOZAFARI 4 Linguistic realism and modernity: the ontology of the poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib 112 HENRY M. BOWLES 5 A predestined break from the past: Shiʿr-i Naw, history, and hermeneutics 141 FATEME MONTAZERI PART 2 6 Intimating Tehran: the fi gure of the prostitute in Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s 165 JAIRAN GAHAN vi Contents 7 Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow 185 SAMUEL HODGKIN 8 Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive 213 PARISA VAZIRI Index 243 Figures 2.1 The archetypal Shaykh and Shūkh, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdarū 38 2.2 (a–d) Parallel Texts, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdārū 43 7.1 [Artist unknown], back cover illustration, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, Krimil, trans. Nâzım Hikmet 196 7.2 [Artist unknown], cover illustration, Krimil 197 8.1 Still from B ād-i Jin 216 8.2 Still from T ranquility in the Presence of Others 221 8.3 Still from N ifrīn 223 Contributors Henry M. Bowles is a DPhil student in Classics at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies, all from Harvard University. Jairan Gahan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her novel Z īr-i Āftāb-i Khushkhiyāl-i ‘Asr (Under the Carefree Afternoon Sun) won the Golshiri Award for First Novel in 2011. Samuel Hodgkin received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Colgate University, and he completed his dissertation as a Mellon Humanities Fellow and an exchange scholar at Harvard University. Fateme Montazeri is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California Berkeley. She received her BA and MA from the University of Tehran and completed another MA at the Graduate Theologi- cal Union. 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. Parisa Vaziri is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University with joint affi liation in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies. Her research explores the legacies of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world. Hamid Rezaei Yazdi received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He is cur- rently a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College. 1 Introduction H amid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari S cholarship on Persian literature and its place in the history of modern Iran is haunted by questions of origins and infl uence. Despite continuing efforts to disen- tangle them from their perceived indebtedness to European and Anglo-American models, Persian texts remain tethered to the metropolitan spark of genius in one shape or form. Ever since “fi rst contact” was made in the nineteenth century, this infl uence is argued to have “increased in width and intensity.”1 Indeed, frameworks that rely considerably upon Western benchmarks, modalities and timelines have been employed regularly to explain the history of modern Persian literature – and with astonishing currency and success. W hat this volume seeks to do is expose the limits of key suppositions concerning textual production and reception as they are premised upon the “rule of colonial difference.”2 Without thoroughly discounting the notion of colonial servility and its effects on textual production, what we are here primarily concerned with are organic literary developments, local and regional networks and rooted forms of experimen- tation.3 Above all, we seek to disburden modernity of its aseptic remoteness from tradition by acknowledging tradition’s role in shaping Iranian modernity. Occluded by decades of literary scholarship – perhaps due to convention – the necessity of this intervention is made all the more glaring once one considers the way the wide- spread employment of spatial metaphors in prevailing histories betrays the underly- ing notion that modern Persian works are somehow the (frequently rotten) fruits of Western imagination and industry, in the same vein as “legal and institutional frameworks”4 and other constructions of the “self and community.”5 S tandard accounts relate how a certain format (the novel, the novella, the short story) or genre (for instance, S hiʿr-i Naw [New Poetry]) “entered” Iran at a certain point in time, was “introduced” into Persian literature by an exemplary fi gure (often a founding father), was “brought back” by Iranian students or by other members of the intelligentsia studying or living in Europe (predominantly through translation), or followed shortly after schools or technologies, cut from the cloth of the West’s intellectual tradition, were “imported” into the country, one prime example being the printing press.6 Similar to the way communicable diseases – as part of the civilising mission of the Anglosphere – and other “immense distortions”7 were thought to have smote native barbarism into the maw of obscurity, the introduction of literary

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