Recasting Persian Poetry

Large 8vo. xi 335 pp acknowledgments a note on transliteration Introduction: A Model of Poetic Change 1. A Rhetoric of Subversion; 2. Poetic Signs and Their Spheres; 3. An Open Literary Culture; 4. From Translation to Appropriation; 5. Dismantling a Poetic System; 6. A New Esthetic Tradition; notes bibliography index. First Edition 1995. Green cloth with gilt lettering to spine. ``Using a semiotic model of poetic change the author presents a critical history of the evolution of Persian poetry in modern Iran. Iran''s contact with Europe in the nineteenth century produced largely imaginary ideas about European culture and literature. In particular he proposes a revision of the view that sets the Modernist poet Nima Yushij as the single-handed inventor of ''New Poetry''. This view he argues has resulted in an exaggerated sense of the aesthetic gulf between the modernist poetry of Iran and classical Persian poetry. Through a number of close readings of works by Nima''s predecessors