Modernity and Modernism in Persophone Literary History: A Reader

Project leaders:
Amr Ahmed, Roxane Haag-Higuchi, Christine Nölle-Karimi

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an intensified debate over the role of Persian literature. The search for a new literary mode of expression came together with the attempt to describe and assess the literary heritage and its limitations. Our working group aims at capturing the spirit of this debate and making it accessible to an international and interdisciplinary academic community.

The focus lies on the manner in which modernity was perceived and reflected by the literary actors (poets, authors, literary critics) themselves. A corpus of original texts from all over the Persophone world written during the period will be presented in English translation, accompanied by biographical notes, a select bibliography and an introduction contextualizing the authors and their ideas.

The working group consists of scholars representing different fields of Persophone literary history:

• Amr Ahmed (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Paris)
• Bianca Devos (Philipps-University, Marburg)
• Roxane Haag-Higuchi (Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg)
• Samuel Hodgkin (Yale University, New Haven)
• Justine Landau (Harvard University, Cambridge MA)
• Thomas Loy (Humboldt University, Berlin)
• Christine Nölle-Karimi (Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg and Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)

Publication see:

NÖLLE-KARIMI Christine, LOY Thomas, HAAG-HIGUCHI Roxane (ed.): Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm: A Reader. Wien: ÖAW, 2024. Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik, 91. Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, 942.