The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature

In The Politics of Writing in Iran, Kamran Talattof emphasizes the pattern of literary change in Iran, as he focuses on the relationship among the constructive elements of literary creativity, literary, movement, ideology, and metaphorical language of modern Persian authors.

Emerging in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a secular activity, Persian literature acquired its own modernity by redefining past aesthetic practices of identity and history. By analyzing selected works of major pre- and post-revolutionary literary figures, Talattof shows how Persian literary history has not been an integrated continuum but a series of distinct episodic movements shaped by shifting ideologies. Drawing on western concepts, modern Persian literature has responded to changing social and political conditions through complex strategies of metaphorical and allegorical representations that both construct and denounce cultural continuities.

The Politics of Writing in Iran provides a unique contribution in that it uses texts that demonstrate close affinity to such diverse ideologies as modernism, Marxism, feminism, and Islam. Each ideological standard has influenced the form, characterization, and figurative language of literary texts as well as setting the criteria for literary criticism and determining which issues are to be the focus of literary journals.