The Persian Prison Poem - (Edinburgh Historical Studies of Iran and the Persian World) by Rebecca Ruth Gould (Paperback)

About the Book

Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia., offering an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity.

Book Synopsis

Through a series of insightful and sophisticated readings, this book reveals the worldliness of premodern Persian poetry. It traces the political role of poetry in shaping the prison poem genre (habsiyyat) across 12th-century Central, South and West Asia. Bringing theorists as wide ranging as Kantorowicz, Benjamin and Adorno into conversation with classical Persian poetics, this book offers an unprecedented account of prison poetry before modernity, and of premodern Persianate culture within the framework of world literature and global politics.

Review Quotes

Enriched by several astonishingly creative and meticulous translations and by numerous fresh interpretations, this monograph will be an indispensable reference point for scholars of Islamic literary cultures and specialists of the multi-lingual and multi-confessional empires of the Ghaznavids and Shirwanshahs.

--Kristof Szitar "Acta Via Serica"

Gould draws on history and political theory alongside comparative poetics to offer a brilliant new way of reading classical Persian poetry as a mode of political critique. This first-ever study of Persian prison poetry in English opens new frontiers within Persian studies through its lucid translations and refreshingly insightful analysis. The Persian Prison Poem will change how the prison poem genre is read - indeed, how genre in general is read - within Persian and world literature.

--Muzaffar Alam, Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

This book is a masterful study of the rise of an age-old Persianate literary genre that is at the same time profoundly scholarly in its use of sources, boldly comparative in the deployment of critical theory, and humanistic in its exposition of the interplay of power and politics with the experience of being a prisoner and creating poetry. It should appeal to anyone who is interested in new approaches to world literature.

--Sunil Sharma, Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature, Boston University

With eloquent translations of key medieval Persian poets into English for the first time, the book is an important addition to the field of not just Middle Eastern literature, but medieval and comparative literature as a whole. [...] In writing this book, Gould has, herself, shaken up the genre of literary scholarship [...].

--Fatemeh Shams "Iranian Studies"

With its delicate aesthetic sensitivity, piercing linguistic acumen, and sophisticated theoretical framework, The Persian Prison Poem is a triumph in world literary studies. Rebecca Gould invites us to a captivating conversation between giants of Persian literature - figures like Nasir-i Khusraw, Masʿud Saʿd, and especially Khaqani - with revered masters of the Western canon. Readers will come away enriched with fascinating insights into the development of political theologies, the rivalries of worldly and spiritual power, and poetry as a powerful tool of social transformation. The Persian Prison Poem is a book of scholarly sophistication and literary beauty.

--Shafique N. Virani, author of the Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, a Search for Salvation

About the Author

Professor of Islamic World and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016).