Books Flashcards
Beelaert, Anna Livia. 2000. A Cure for the Grieving: Studies on the Poetry of the 12th-Century Persian Court Poet Khāqānī Širwānī. Leiden: Nederlands Inst. voor het Nabije Oosten.
Six studies on the masnavis of Khaqani with special focus on Tuhfat al-ʿIraqayn.
Discusses his praise of different mamduhs, from royal patrons to the prophet to friends and relatives.
Also discusses the imagery of Khaqani, like personifying the Ka’ba as a woman, medicinal imagery using plants, and descriptions of the seasons and musical instruments and torture.
Berlekamp, Persis (2011). Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Representational art in a corpus of illustrated manuscripts from the 13th-14th centuries of “ ʿajā’ib al-makhluqāt wa-ghara’ib
al-mawjūdāt” provides an example of it being used in a religious context—for the purpose of inducing wonder at God’s creation.
The so-called ‘chinoiserie’ in Persian manuscript painting during the Mongol period speaks as much of intellectual as artistic influence, and further research into the contextualization of the transmission of Chinese aesthetics and imagery into Persian painting during this period is necessary.
Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz (2014). “Lascivious Vines, Corrupted Virgins, and Crimes of Honour: Variations on the Wine Production Myth as Narrated in Early Persian Poetry.” Iranian Studies 47.1 (2014): 87–129.
The wine production origin myth poem is a subgenre of Persian poetry attested to as early as the 10th century.
The major poets to compose wine production myth qasidas are Rudaki, Farrukhi, and Manuchihri, the last of whom greatly expanded the narrative range of the myth.
The genre centers on an anthropomorphized, eroticized female grapevine and the grapes as her virgin daughters, who are corrupted (impregnated) by the sun or other natural elements. The specifics of their honor killing by the gardener, such as ripping them from the vine and smashing them underfoot, then imprisoning their remains in a large vat for several months, follow the general formula for actual wine production.
Yarshater, Ehsan, ed. 2019. Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era, 800-1500: Ghazals, Panegyrics and Quatrains. A History of Persian Literature II. London: I.B. Tauris.
Clinton, Jerome W. 1972. The Divan of Manūchihrī Dāmghānī: A Critical Study. Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures, no. 1. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica.
The premodern tradition is not THAT different from the pre-Islamic tradition of court poetry, but it is distinguished by certain features like the rise in written composition (vs. oral preservation) and the separation of the roles of musician and poet.
Manuchihri’s divan is a productive grounds for exploration of genre theory in Persian literature. Clinton argues that it contains several ghazals, despite critical claims that the ghazal form had not yet materialized in the early 11th century.
Manuchihri Damghani (d. 1040), who flourished in Masʿud of Ghazna’s court, was a poet of mythopoeia, descriptions of nature and the garden, and bacchic themes. His creative and stylistic influence on later poets is probably greater than estimated at the time of publication.
Compagnon, Antoine (2004). Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Discusses and challenges the salient literary theories of his time.
Supports ‘death of the author’ and asserts that an attempt to understand the intentions of the author is an extratextual pursuit that is no longer literary but historical.
Argues that 1:1 mimesis is the purported ideal in Western aesthetics but is both not attainable and not actually preferable since literature is supposed to represent something greater than plain reality.
Culler, Jonathan (2015). Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Main argument: Lyric poetry addresses a ‘you’. It is neither fiction nor nonfiction and does not function through a narrative structure or plot but rather is a performative speech act that is a performance of itself.
van Ruymbeke, Christine (2007). Science and Poetry in Medieval Persia: The Botany of Nizami’s Khamsa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Apparently is a very poor study of the topic that puts an improper focus on ‘science’ when really Nizami probably drew on common knowledge from his time in a lot of his descriptions of plants and trees.
de Blois, François (2004). Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey. Volume V: Poetry of the Pre-Mongol period. London, New York: Routledge.
Contains biographical and historical information about all the major poets, as well as catalogues of all the manuscripts associated with each poet. Also has notes on critical editions and which are better to use.
During, Jean (1988). Musique et extase: l’audition mystique dans la tradition soufie. Paris: Albin Michel.
The genres and repertoires of Sufi, or Muslim mystical music are at the point of intersection of religious music, art mu sic, folk music, dance music, music of healing and trance.
Chapter I is a lucid exposition of the significance of musical audition to the medieval Sufis. Chapter II briefly distinguishes between the concepts of dhikr and samāʿ.
The second appendix prepares a balanced summary of the legal arguments about music, using much of the same material which had been presented in a rather more orthodox fashion by Nelson (1985) and al-Faruqi (1985).
Derāyati, Mostafā, ed. (1390–/2011–). Fehrestegān: Noskhehā-ye khatti-ye irān (fankhā), 45 vols. Tehran: Sāzemān-e Asnād-o Ketābkhāne-ye Melli-ye Jomhuri-ye Eslāmi-ye Irān.
45 volumes of all the manuscripts in Iran(?).
Feuillebois-Pierunek, Ève (2002). A la croisée des voies célestes. Faxr al-Din ʿErâqi: poésie mystique et expression poétique en Perse médiévale. Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 2002.
four-part study: metaphysics of love, typology of characters (lover, beloved, etc), mystical psychology, modes of expression (libertinage, wine, shahed-bazi)
Looks at ‘Iraqi’s influence from Sana’i, Ahmad Ghazali, and Ibn ‘Arabi. Also discusses his Lame’āt, a treatise on Sufism. Insan-i kamil, qalandariyya, shahid bazi
van Gelder, G.J H. 1982. Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem. Leiden: Brill.
de Fouchécour, Charles-Henri (1969). La description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIe siècle: inventaire et analyse des thèmes. Paris: C. Klincksieck.
Focuses on nature description in Ghaznavid lyric poetry.
Compares descriptions by ‘Unsurl, Farrukhl, and Manuchihri; also Qatran, Mu’izzi, and Azraqi, and Labibi, ‘Asjadi, Nasir-i Khusraw, and Mas’iud Sa’d-i Salman.
Contains an index of all the plants, flowers etc. in the works of unsuri, farrukhi, and manuchihri, which by itself is a helpful resource.
de Fouchécour, Charles-Henri (1986). Moralia: Les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3e/9e au 7e/13e siècle. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
Looks at pand/andarz literature from the pre-Islamic period on.
Allows the reader “to conceive of Persian didactic literature as a genre with its own history, its own conventions, and its own dynamics of evolution.”
One methodological issue is that a lot of the poetry of the period is moralizing in some way, so the range of texts studied here becomes a little staggering: Qabusnama, Kimiya-i Saʿdat, Makhzan al-asrar (Nizami), and Gulistan/Bustan.
Glünz, Michael. 1996. “Poetic Tradition and Social Change: The Persian Qasida in Post-Mongol Iran.” In Sperl and Schackle, ed. 1996, vol. 1, pp. 183–203.
Hamidiyān, Saʿid (1383/2004). Saʿdi dar ghazal. Tehran: Nashr-e Qatre.
Homāʾi, Jalāl al-Din (1347/1995). Fonun-e balāghat-o sanāʿāt-e adabi. Tehran: Tus.
Ingenito, Domenico. 2020. Beholding Beauty: Saʿdī of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Jackson, Virginia, and Yopie Prins, eds. (2014). The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
This anthology traces a critical genealogy of the modern idea of lyric as it has emerged in Anglo-American literary criticism of the past century.
The lyric poem is the poet’s act of ‘turning away from the audience’ and performing a speech act of internal monologue or of making thoughts into words. But there is some tension in this conceptualization hinted at by the word ‘performing’; 17th century critics knew on some level that the poet could not truly fully be unconscious of his audience.
In the 20th century, within classrooms the idea of the ‘lyric persona’ emerged, as well as the idea of lyric as fiction. We know that some critics, like Culler, disagree and argue that lyric is outside of fact or fiction.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh. 1998. Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press.
This book is ass.
Keshavarz, Fatemeh (2015). Lyrics of Life: Saʿdi on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
This book is also ass.
