Mostafa Abedinifard, Omid Azadibougar, Amirhossein Vafa (eds.). Persian Literature as World Literature

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions, censorship, and the “Neither Western nor Eastern” motto following the 1979 Revolution. Therefore, it might seem that Persian literature of Iran today has no claim of “worldliness”. However, the fact that post-revolutionary Iran is the focus of several chapters in this volume challenges such presuppositions about contemporary Iranian literature. The fact that it belongs to the Literature as World Literature Series is a testimony to the bringing of Persian literature into dialogue with other World Literatures represented in this series