The Novel in Contemporary Iran: A Sociological Reading of Selected Contemporary Persian Novels
Journal Title: Literary Text Research - Year 2024, Vol 28, Issue 100
Abstract
In this article, the status of the Persian novel has been investigated via an interdisciplinary approach during the last hundred years. The research starts with the emergence of the Persian novel and continues up to the 2010s/1390s A.H., and it looks into the selected novels from a sociological outlook, i.e., studying literature within its social, cultural, political and historical context. The introduction of modernism into the Iranian society paved the way for the advent of this newly emerging type of literature in Persian literary tradition. Moreover, changes in the political and social structure of the Iranian society led to the establishment and the formation of various periods in the history of the Persian novel. Besides, communication with the modern world and accordingly familiarity with modern world literature through translation had also a considerable role in this process of transformation. To support the claims made in this research, examples will be presented from different novels written during the aforementioned period.
Authors and Affiliations
Abdolrasoul Shakeri
Sir William Jones and the Shahnameh
The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in European aesthetics. It was also a time of increasing contact between Europe and Asia. The rise of Oriental literary scholarship was a natural outgr...
Poetry of Epiphany: James Wright and Sohrab Sepehri
This paper’s aim is to present a comparative study of the poetry of the American James Arlington Wright and the Persian Sohrab Sepehri in order to examine the main ground of convergence in their poetry, which is epiphany...
Translations and Imitations of the Shahnameh in Turkish Lands
Reading and reciting the Shahnameh in Persian was popular not only in Persianate lands, like some parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but in Ottoman empire as well. Furthermore, some of the stories of the Shahnameh w...
The Saint of Faithfulness: Attār’s Odyssean Pious Woman
This article offers a detailed study of a story by one of the giants of Persian literature, Farid al-din Attār. It particularly focuses on the character of Attār’s “The Pious Woman”, who emerges as a symbol of faithfulne...
Broken Lyres: Epic, Performance, and History in Mehdi Akhavān Sāles’ “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh”
In “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh” by Mehdi Akhavān Sāles (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition...