Classical Persian Literature (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Brief Overview of Medieval Persian Literature
Studies in English Language Teaching, 2017
Reviewing the origins of a particular literary history allows us to better comprehend the allusions the literature conveys and why we appreciate them. It also allows us to anticipate how the literature may progress (Fouchecour, 2006) I will try to keep this approach in the reader's mind in presenting this brief summary of medieval Persian literature, a daunting task considering the multiplicity and wealth of the texts and documentation on the subject (Fouchecour, 2006). In this study we will pay special attention to the progress of Persian literature over the last millennia, concentrating in particular on the early development and background of various literary genres in Persian. Although the idea of literary genres is rather subjective and unstable (Perkins, 1993, pp. 29-33), studying them is a worthwhile approach for an overview, enabling better understanding, deeper argumentation, and deeper analysis than would a simple listing of dates, titles, and basic biographical facts of the giants of Persian literature.
Historical Roots of the Persian Language and Literature
Today, the tradition of the so-called Iran, which is called the Iranian state, is rising on the shoulders of a 3000-year historical and political accumulation. Ever since the concept and the understanding of history have existed, many civilizations have lived in this geography, and so many different states have been established and destroyed. Within this cycle, every culture has contributed to and shaped the cultural and political structure of its successors. Persian geography, which has an active state tradition, passes through the western intellectual and political culture, mostly in the late 19th century and early 20th century. This interaction is so strong and fast that Iran, which entered the 20th century with oxen and plows, has become one of the countries with the highest traffic accidents in the world as it moves out of the century. From this date on, Iran has been striving to bring its history, language and literary authenticity together with a modern system in a common pavilion. For this reason, Iranian Culture and Literature have been transformed into a different medium with the understanding of the system it faces. It has become a matter to be investigated how Iran, especially since the 20th century, entered into an intellectual way with new understandings and how this intelligent way affected the literature.
Persianists in Europe and in Iran have been codifying manuscripts and publishing critical editions of texts for over two centuries now, yet only in the last decade has a program in codicology and paleography at the University of Tehran been established to systematically pass on the collective wisdom and experience of the great textual scholars. A wealth of information about the manuscript transmission of isolated literary works can of course be gleaned from the introductions to numerous critical editions and from a variety of studies. However, no one has as yet pieced these together to create a systematic narrative history of Persian manuscript culture in particular (as opposed to the manuscript cultures of Classical Greek and Latin, or the various vernaculars of medieval Europe), its scribal traditions, the history of its royal scriptoria and medieval libraries, the economics of the Persian manuscript trade, and so forth. A comprehensive historical study of the development of literary transmission, the processes by which literary works were produced, published and preserved in the chirographic environment of the medieval and early modern period would undoubtedly enhance the efforts of those working to produce critical texts of Persian literature, by creating a greater degree of consensus and standardization in editorial decisions. This paper presents three authorial versions of a poem by Najm al-Din Daye and the different circumstances under which he produced and dedicated the three versions in different contexts and for different patrons.
Oral Character of Middle Persian Literature – New Perspective
From the very beginning oral transmission of texts played a significant role in the Iranian world. It became a main topic of several works by Bailey (1943), Boyce (1957), de Menasce (1973, Skjaervø (1384hš), and Tafazzoli (1378hš). In my paper I try to depict the problem of orality in Middle Persian literature once again, but this time using some tools developed by Ong.
The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History
This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared Persianate literary heritage, considering literary history as an important and perhaps overlooked site for the production of literary modernity. Arguing for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernity shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals, Jabbari examines how these intellectuals made use of premodern materials for their modernizing projects, and how nationalism shaped this process. Four aspects of modern literary history writing receive particular focus here: engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary national figures alongside poets, use of a shared set of references and sources, and new sexual aesthetics that break with the homoerotic Persianate past.