Missing Persians

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)>Missing Persians</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)> serves to articulate in elegant vibrant prose the disparate and displaced narratives of five Persian subjects. Nasrin Rahimieh's complex and nuanced arguments effectively demonstrate the links that her five figures have to a stable Persian identity-complicated by their experiences of travel exile conversion and social change.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)>Rahimieh delineates the captivating histories of missing Persians from the sixteenth century to modern times and defines the arbitrary generic boundaries that isolate Persian biographies autobiographies travelogues and social histories. Balancing their documentary and historical value with creative and fictional elements she reads them as individual engagements with broader questions of Persian identity at different moments of the nation's history. As modes of self-expression these texts reveal both remnants of traditional Persian literary forms and new styles adopted through translations and readings in European literature and history.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)>Even as it sheds new light on crucial points in cultural self-definition </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)>Missing Persians</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(62 61 60 1)> offers a fresh look at traditional institutions the role of women and Persia's turbulent struggle to enter modernity on its own terms.</span></p><p><br></p>