Academic literature on the topic 'Persian Historical fiction'

For at least the past several decades, Persian literary scholarship has drawnits conceptual framework largely from the social sciences. Despite severalnoteworthy exceptions, a tendency to read Persian literature for its sociopoliticalcontent still guides the way scholars write about and teach the fieldtoday. Indeed, a brief survey of course syllabi with “Persian literature” in theirtitles would no doubt reveal that instructors (the present writer included) byand large introduce writers and their works based on non-literary socio-historicaldevelopments, either arranging texts chronologically by their years ofproduction or presenting them (still usually chronologically) as reflections ofthe historical events, social movements, and ideological currents that shapedthe societies from which those texts arose.Mehdi Khorrami’s Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction:Who Writes Iran? challenges this trend, arguing that we do a great disserviceto both individual texts and literary studies as a discipline when weconsider non-literary factors as the primary criteria by which to analyze andschematize literary works. Instead, while acknowledging the importance ofsocial, historical, and ideological contexts, in other words the world outsidethe text, Khorrami’s study of contemporary Persian fiction contends that wemust scrutinize the world inside the texts – their aesthetic, linguistic, and formaldevices and concepts – to develop a comprehensive view of literature’shistorical evolution.The work under review argues that modernist Persian fiction evolves froma counter-discursive to a non-discursive position vis-à-vis official discoursesin Iran, primarily under the Islamic Republic. The author’s conception of discursivityrelates directly to his understanding of the term modernist. The single ...

The present article discusses how terrains of belonging are constructed and articulated textually through historical novels which bring the past into the present, and link the national identity of people to memories of their ancestors, to their nation’s glorious past. The rise of the historical novel in Iran was concomitant with Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which was hailed by many a critic and historian as a major time of sociopolitical awakening which contributed to protecting the cultural legacies of the past and keeping aglow the propitious light of belonging and nationhood. Historiography has been a fecund ground for Iranian fiction-writers in which to retrieve a sense of national identity. This article aims at showing how Persian historical novels foreground the symbiotic relationship between remembering and belonging, and open up texts to their national significances.

This paper analyzes the conceptualization of ideas of race in three historical novels in the fictional work of Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), a Syrian Christian intellectual who wrote on the Golden Ages of Islamic History through serialized, popular works of historical fiction. In the novels analyzed, Fath al-Andalus (Conquest of Andalusia), Abbasa Ukht al-Rashid (The Caliph’s Sister), and al-Amin wa al-Ma’mun (The Caliph’s Heirs), Zaydan depicts hierarchies of race that are delineated by certain features and categories, especially within the Abbasid among household slaves, and also centers the conflict within the novels around issues of differences in race and lineage. Zaydān shows the importance of rifts in Islamic history stemming from categorizations and distinctions between Arab and non-Arab, or Arab and Persian, or mawāli. The novels also reflect the self-conceptualization of Egyptians in relation to their perceptions of the Sudanese, at a time of the rise of Arab nationalism, in late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Abstract This article examines the reception of Edgar Allan Poe in modern Persian literature with regard to his fiction and theory of writing. There have been scattered pieces written on Poe’s influence on Iranian poets and writers in Persian or English, but this article aims to offer a fairly comprehensive picture of Poe in Iran in general with a focus on his influence or affinities with two leading Iranian authors, Sadeq Hedayat and Sadeq Chubak, as far as female characters are concerned. The article at first surveys how Poe was introduced into Persian literature and then it studies personal, social, political, and historical backgrounds in classical and modern Persian literature that determined men’s taking a misogynous approach. A comparative study of representative works of Hedayat and Chubak reveals conscious alignment with Poe’s ideas. Confessionary monologues, gloomy atmosphere, and the lack of proper dialogues between men and women mark their writings. The article concludes that although patriarchy has been responsible for these two writers’ failures to overcome gender stereotypes, their acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe had its impact on aggravating such tendencies.

The article is a part of the research introduction to the new Russian translation of the Chahar maqala (“Four Discourses”) by Nizami ‘Aruzi Samarqandi, scheduled for publication next year as part of the third book in the series The Persian Mirrors for Princes Written in the Saljuq Period: Originals and Fabrications. This article is focused on the textual and literary analysis of the text illustrative and evidentiary base consisting of over 40 entertaining stories. According to the way of creating historical fiction, these stories are divided into five main categories: a) author’s fictions, following a certain structure and added to the formally plausible part of a story; b) author’s concoctions from beginning to end; c) the stories with an event borrowed from somewhere, but provided with an invented plot; d) the autobiographical memories, which stand out with amazing chronological accuracy against the unbelievable background of the first three categories; e) the borrowings from Arabic texts in the author’s translation.

Jurji Zaydan was born in Beirut, Lebanon on Dec. 14, 1861, into a Greek Orthodox family. Many of his works focused on the Arab Awakening. The journal that he founded, al-Hilal, is still published today. His writings have been translated from Arabic into Persian, Turkish and Urdu as well as English, French and German. By the time he died unexpectedly in Cairo on July 21, 1914, at the age of fifty three, he had already established himself, in a little over twenty years, as one of the most prolific and influential thinkers and writers of the Arab Nahda (Awakening), but also as an educator and intellectual innovator, whose education was not based on traditional or religious learning. Philip Thomas called Zaydan, “the archetypical member of the Arab Nahda at the end of nineteenth century.” Zaydan transformed his society by helping build the Arab media, but he was also an important literary figure, a pioneer of the Arabic novel, and a historian of Islamic civilization. Zaydan was an intellectual who proposed new world view, a new social order, and new political power. Zaydan was the author of twenty-two historical novels covering the entirety of Arab/Islamic history. In these novels Zaydan did not attempt to deal with the history in chronological order, nor did he cover the whole of Islamic history; rather, his purpose was to popularize Islamic history through the medium of fiction. This paper will offer a brief analytical outline of Zaydan’s historical novels and how his critics viewed them.

This article is devoted to a comparative axiological analysis of phraseological units (PUs) with yellow color in Russian and Persian linguistic cultures. The perception of colors among different peoples may differ and directly depend on the historical, cultural, social, religious and natural conditions of development of a given people. The object of the study are phraseological units of the Russian and Persian languages containing the yellow color (38 units in total), selected regardless of the degree of semantic unity of the components of phraseological units and the method of phraseologization, temporal characteristics, speech or linguistic affiliation, included in proverbs, sayings of famous personalities, quotes from fiction and the method of phraseologization, temporal characteristics, speech or linguistic affiliation, selected by a continuous sampling method from explanatory, phraseological, etymological and encyclopedic dictionaries of the Russian and Persian languages, literary texts, as well as the media. The main research methods used in this work are the comparative method and axiological analysis of phraseological units containing the color term “yellow” in the Russian and Persian languages. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the study of phraseological units containing “yellow” in two languages from the point of view of axiology. Based on the results of the analysis of the estimated values of phraseological units with “yellow” component, a conclusion is drawn about the attitude towards this color in the axiological picture of the world of the speakers of the languages under study and we have clarified the meaning of the yellow color in the phraseological picture of the world of the Russian and Persian languages and confirm the absence of a binary axiological opposition.

This article reads Annie Dillard’s short text ‘Death of a Moth’ (1976) in a comparative context, focusing mostly on the description of the scene of the moth’s self-immolation in a candle flame. After considering the challenges that the text poses to the category ‘short fiction’, the article discusses the different uses of the image of ‘the moth and the flame’ in different cultures. Focusing especially on the Persian literary tradition, the historical variability of interpretations of the image is outlined, and closer parallels are drawn between Dillard’s text and Aḥmad Ghazzālī’s interpretation of ‘love’ through their respective narrations of the moth’s death in the candle flame. In a closer reading of Dillard’s text, an uneasy coexistence is revealed between a mystical inclination and an ironic, self-consciously literary use of imagery and figurative language.

The lexical composition of any national language, its total vocabulary, is a phenomenon that is formed throughout the entire historical development of this nation. The vocabulary of languages is enriched by internal and external resources. In most languages, internal resources are the main source of vocabulary replenishment. However, external factors also play a role. External factors include borrowing.Borrowing is the transfer of vocabulary from one language to another. They increase the vocabulary of the language, serving as a source of new stems, phrases and terms.The topic of "borrowing" is one of the most widely studied topics in lexicology. We can learn about the relationships between contacting nations through assimilation. Therefore, this topic is still the subject of research in many linguistic studies.When loanwords enter the language system, they go through several processes of adaptation. These adaptation processes can be phonetic, grammatical, semantic, graphic or stylish. Each adaptation is a separate topic and needs to be studied separately. Of these, grammatical adaptation, in particular morphological adaptation, is studied with particular interest. By this way, we can find out to what extent a foreign word has been borrowed to the language system.This article is devoted to the morphological adaptation of Turkic borrowings in Persian. In it, Turkic loanwords between independent word groups such as noun, adjective, form, number, and verb were studied, and the extent to which they adopted grammatical categories was studied.In particular, categories specific to the categories of words were considered, such as plural affixes, word formation and degrees of adjectives. Examples were taken from fiction and online materials to determine if loanwords are in use today. Examples have been given in sentence structure to better define the meaning of loanwords. Transcript and translation of sentences were also given as examples.

Literature is considered to be an art form or writing that have Artistic or Intellectual value. Literature is a group of works produced by oral and written form. Literature shows the style of Human Expression. The word literature was derived from the Latin root word ‘Litertura / Litteratura’ which means “Letter or Handwriting”. Literature is culturally relative defined. Literature can be grouped through their Languages, Historical Period, Origin, Genre and Subject. The kinds of literature are Poems, Novels, Drama, Short Story and Prose. Fiction and Non-Fiction are their major classification. Some types of literature are Greek literature, Latin literature, German literature, African literature, Spanish literature, French literature, Indian literature, Irish literature and surplus. In this vast division, the researcher has picked out Indian English Literature. Indian literature is the literature used in Indian Subcontinent. The earliest Indian literary works were transmitted orally. The Sanskrit oral literature begins with the gatherings of sacred hymns called ‘Rig Veda’ in the period between 1500 - 1200 B.C. The classical Sanskrit literature was developed slowly in the earlier centuries of the first millennium. Kannada appeared in 9th century and Telugu in 11th century. Then, Marathi, Odiya and Bengali literatures appeared later. In the early 20th century, Hindi, Persian and Urdu literature begins to appear.

This study consists of an exegesis examining modes of narration in literary fiction; and a creative work: an extract of a proposed novel Boots of Spanish Leather. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, this is the story of a shrewd and ambitious young foot soldier striving to escape the peasant class, who, risking everything he holds dear, joins the ill-fated Spanish Armada. The Absentee Narratee mode of presentation developed for use in Boots of Spanish Leather explores the theoretical foundations for the use of second person thought utterances in First Person-Present Tense narrative situations.

The Introduction offers a survey of the primary non-Christian and Christian sources available for a reconstruction of the short reign of Jovian. The most important source obviously is Book 25 of Res Gestae of the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus. He presents a gloomy picture of the person and reign of Jovian in order to save the image of his hero and Jovian’s predecessor, Julian (the Apostate). From Edward Gibbon onward, modern scholarship has adopted this unfavorable image that presents Jovian’s reign as a meaningless period between the emperorship of Julian (361–363) and the rule of the Valentinians (364–378). However, Jovian’s rule was vital for the sustenance of imperial leadership after Julian’s disastrous Persian military campaign and religious policies, both of which caused considerable upheaval. Jovian’s reign was a return to the norms of the pre-Julianic period and brought back stability to the Roman empire. For an emperor who ruled such a short time, the Christian Jovian had an unexpected and surprising afterlife. The second part of the book discusses Jovian’s “Nachleben” in the so-called Syriac Julian Romance, a text of historical fiction that has rarely been studied and is largely unknown to historians of the late Roman period.

Abstract The old proverb πολλα ψεν´δονται αοιδοí (‘poets tell a lot of lies’) can still more accurately be applied to their biographers. Even the more plausible and psychologically tempting details in the lives of ancient literary figures derive from these authors’ fictional works, poems, and dramas, and not from the kind of source material biographers use today, letters, documents, eyewitness testimony. Critics and readers eager to establish some historical correlation between any ancient poet’s life and his work should expect to be disappointed. But even if the ancient Hves are useless to the historian or critic trying to explain what in Euripides’ experience compelled him to write about Medea, these stories are of interest to mythologists. If we stop being angry with the Lives for failing to be historical, and look at them rather as myths or fairy tales, some informative patterns begin to emerge.

Abstract One of my tasks in this second talk is to answer some of the questions which I begged in the first. I wanted to concentrate on eschatological fictions, fictions of the End, in relation to apocalypse itself; and though I did say something about these as analogous to literary fictions, by means of which we impose other patterns on historical time, I did little to justify the analogy. And when I spoke of the degree to which fictions vary from the paradigmatic base, I again confined myself largely to straight apocalypse-the way the type figures were modified, made to refer not to a common End but to personal death or to crisis, or to epoch. I mentioned that literary fictions changed in the same way-perpetually recurring crises of the person, and the death of that person, took over from myths which purport to relate one’s experience to grand beginnings and ends.

Abstract Generally speaking, it is doubtful whether the traditional idiom of the Muses as attested in Homer and Hesiod can be fully applicable to the sort of poetry which flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries BC and which is conventionally labelled as ‘lyric’. We saw that the Muses of the epic tradition were essentially eyewitnesses of past events, who transferred their knowledge of these events to the poet and thus guaranteed the truthfulness of his account. Now in so far as most Greek ‘lyric’ poetry, both sung and recited, was, perhaps with the exception of Stesichorus’, presumably first person poetry dealing with the here and now rather than the historical past, we may well wonder for what particular purpose the ‘lyric’ poets would have needed the Muses’ help at all. Examination of the Muses’ role in each separate genre of ‘lyric’ poetry gives us the answer.

This chapter examines David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl, a historical fiction based on the life of Lili Elbe (1882–1931), reputed to be one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment treatment. Genres of life writing have played a prominent role in the representation of transgender lives; the relationship between historical record, autobiography and historical fiction is complicated by the possibility that Elbe may have been an intersex person. This chapter examines the extent to which conventions of transsexual life writing obscure narratives of intersex existence, investigating the novel’s relationship to a formative source text, a generically hybrid auto/biography. The implications of the novel’s reliance on the binary categories of identity prevalent in Man into Woman will be explored in relation to categories of sex, gender (especially femininity) and sexuality (specifically male homosexuality).

This article examines the problem of correlation between documentary and personal when the researcher faces the description of an event or a certain person made by some biased people or dealing with the question single-mindedly. N.Y. Eidelman’s research “visionariness”, combining an historical approach with the insider view of some unclear moments of the Chernigov Regiment revolt (29 Oct 1825 — 3 Jan 1826) backed by both half-fictional (memoirs of those not having been witnesses to what happened) and documentary (investigation materials) texts, is a method that allows to reconstruct with psychological credibility the possible course of events and inner motives of those taking part in the Revolt as if from a participant’s point of view. The plot is transferred from an historical to a literary, even mythological area, that is quite logical considering the development of the “Decembrist myth” in the Russian culture of the 20th century; fiction and tales of those staying out of the scene are being posed next to documents and become themselves documents and “human science” attributes. Given that there are a lot of personal and unresolved matters (as it is in the case of the scene in Lubar), the creative interpretation becomes an appropriate variant of its reception, and the historical commentary allows the content to keep ethic actuality and to shape the readers’ opinion on the main characters. In our turn, we, by means of the same materials, are working at the parallel event reconstruction, commenting not only Gorbachevsky, whose Notes were one of the main Eidelman’s sources, but also Eidelman himself, who created the fictional and non-fictional world of Apostle Sergei.

Abstract Recent biographical assessments of Poe seem to be reaching a consensus, in J. Gerald Kennedy’s words, on the “compulsions—intellectual and imaginative—that shaped his work” (“Violence,” 534). Because these compulsions and the object relations they entail divide along gender lines, they represent a useful paradigm for beginning an overview of Poe and nineteenth-century gender constructions. Like Kennedy; Kenneth Silverman emphasizes the importance of Eliza Poe’s death (as well as the deaths of Fanny Allan and Jane Standard) on the youthful Poe, especially the way his mother’s death causes a life long fixation on women’s deaths and returns from the grave. Silverman accounts for the “peculiar cluster of dead-alive persons” in the poetry and fiction by appealing to modern theories of childhood bereavement. Adults “learn to live with the death of someone they have loved by gradually and painfully withdrawing their deep investment of feeling in the person. But children who lose a parent at an early age, as Edgar lost Eliza Poe, instead in vest more feeling in and magnify the parent’s image” (76). The grieving child, in other words, invests desire in the parent’s re turn from the dead.

As different from the concept of affect, that of memory fortunately refuses to be dismissed. This is partly due to the enduring importance of memory in thought about culture. Moreover, it harbours the issue of agency. This chapter recalls earlier thoughts about memory as an (active) act, as happening in the present, and as both subjective and collective. And Silverman's formulation of subjectivity as a constellation of memory images, foregrounds the importance of memory for culture. But memory is also liable to error, abuse, and repression. This final chapter considers where acts of memory either remain un-performed, or misfire. As a counterpart to the opening chapter, the book ends by bringing together the different aspects of image-thinking as, specifically, thinking in film. The preposition “in”, here, is analogous to its use in the expression “thinking in a foreign language”. Reasonable Doubt's recasting of a great philosopher (Descartes) as an affect-deprived, emotionally overwrought person is also the only fiction film where the subject is a real historical figure. This facilitates a short rehearsal of the relationship, in film, of documentary and fiction and of history and fiction.

Completes the historical arc of the book, exploring the last generations of medieval writers, ushering in the Renaissance. Juan Manuel, Dante Alighieri, and Giovanni Boccaccio, created a new identity for Saladin after two centuries of European writing about the sultan. The refashioned Saladin challenged fellow knights on matters of chivalry, religion, and political history. Spanish and Italian literature used him in order to perform an allegorical, critical review of Christian identity. As these three European authors contemplated the fractious political spaces that their kingdoms were becoming, they found in Saladin a persona both chivalric and unsettling to chivalry as an institution. The Renaissance is known as the age in which Europe rediscovered Antiquity for the sake of intellectual progress, but that work was initiated through medieval reflections upon courtly life.

Abstract Fictional spaces produced with multidisciplinary research using improving technologiescreate settings that provoke new questions and have diff erent answers. This comes about bybroadening the horizons in virtual space studies, space concept, design, and experience. Evaluatingvirtual space as a layer of reality represents architectural space that belongs to the physical world.The principal factors that form the physicality of a space, its shape and content, are related tocultural, public, societal, perceptual, and intellectual codes. The space concept can be explained asa physical concept. In the sense of human interaction with space, the feelings it elicits, perceptualfactors, both in the subjective and abstract dimensions, that can be described as feelings, and 3Dphysicality. Spaces designed and produced for human use can be perceived diff erently and meanother things to diff erent people through human–space interactions. Perceiving, interpreting, anddescribing a space is a complex process that can only occur by experiencing it.Although virtual reality emerged as a simulation of physical space, there are increasing attempts toform an emotional and physical connection to such spaces today. New technologies used to createnew spaces and descriptions such as virtual reality, virtual space, cyberspace, and hybrid space arearticulated as new layers within the spatial memory accumulated to date.Virtual reality technologies, which can be explained as an interface between humans and machinesand describe diff erent life systems, give one the feeling of being in another space. Although thesespaces are virtual, they can be related to the space concept as they can be experienced and give thefeeling of being somewhere. These settings, which present multi-dimensional spatial experiences bytaking humans into a digital reality, are created using computer support and are experienced usingvarious electronic tools. These settings in which human and machine, organic and non-organicentities meet are also crucial in design education as they improve creative processes related to thefuture, machine-human interaction, and the space concept and its formation.As virtuality beingevaluated as a layer of reality becomes a representation of architectural space that belongs to thephysical world, it also has the potential to approach space design in a new way.It has the potential to aff ect and improve the perception of creating space and deliver spatialsolutions, understand new living conditions, and discover the future by responding to technologicalimprovements.Virtual reality creates a personal space experience that diff racts space and time—improvingtechnologies set these spaces, which simulate reality, as a layer of fact, a refl ection or representation.The cyber and virtual experiences that have emerged in new media spaces have reduced space’sdependency on the physical world through the integration of improving technologies and art. ‘SALT Research’ within Salt Galata, a monumental building in Galata-İstanbul, and ‘Virtual Archive’, a media art project by Refik Anadol that questions the virtual-digital space concept, were chosen as experience spaces. It was emphasized that there are holistic composition differences between spaces due to the current physical space experience that composes the infrastructure of the study and virtual space. It is composed of different elements and is perceived just like real space. The dataset includes a detailed assessment of two different spaces with similar contexts and contains the physical and virtual space analysis through syntactic, semantic and pragmatic scales. Volunteer participants emphasized the differences in holistic composition between the two spaces. They noted that the virtual space differs from the physical space and is composed of different elements and that the user has the perception of belonging just like in a physical space.The physical space, SALT Research, was evaluated as satisfactory and high-quality in terms of aesthetics and equipment. Phrases used to describe it were neat, high spaces, comfort, spaciousness, light, dark areas, tranquillity, silence, acoustic balance, harmony, historical, gripping, transformation, aesthetic and functional, and plain. In contrast, participants saw the Virtual Archive is a new, exciting, different, and innovative experience. The bodily freedom of the virtual space experience was described as optimistic. Through a brief understanding of the space, they overcame the difficulties of physical existence that arose when accessing information in this new environment.Fictional space produced with a multidisciplinary study using improving technologies creates settings where new questions are asked, and different answers are made, broadening the horizons in virtual space studies, space concept, design, and experience. Virtuality being evaluated as a layer of reality represents architectural space that belongs to the physical world.Virtual reality technology changes and influences our time, dimension, and architectural perceptions, the modes of expression and interaction models in art and architecture by taking us into a different universe experienced spiritually and mentally in new space creations.The space experience through the journey of interpretation and understanding of space and architecture tells different things for each person on each occasion. Perceiving space through the physical space experience and active senses via intellectual feedback also affects virtual reality interactions.Different disciplines examine the machine, human, space, and future relations in an interdisciplinary environment. Different designs’ varieties and opportunities have a place in architecture and interior architecture. In the future, the integration of physical space, virtual space, and machine intelligence into space design and design education and the role and effect of the designer will continue to be discussed.Today, new representation environments present new evolutions that improve, evaluate, and interpret spatial ideas. Despite changing technologies, humans must exist somewhere, and existence is related to our sensory, emotional, and memorial creations. In this sense, the place of humans and designers will continue to be questioned in the new spaces created. Keywords: Patrik Schumacher, ethics, ethical paradigms in architecture, humanitarian architecture, architectural media platforms.