Journal of Persianate Studies 3 (2010) 128-141 brill.nl/jps

Review Essay

Michael Craig Hillmann The University of Texas at Austin

General Introduction to Persian Literature. Edited by J.T.P. de Bruijn. Volume 1 of A History of Persian Literature. General Editor—Ehsan Yarshater. Lon- don, UK, and New York, NY: I.B. Taurus, 2009. xxvi, 573p.

The book under review begins with a Foreword by Ehsan Yarshater and ends with essays by Iraj Afshar. How fitting that a General Introduction to Persian Literature should begin and end with writing by the two Persianists who are doing more these days for writing in the Persian language than anyone else. Yet, as remarkable as the current work of Messrs. Yarshater and Afshar is, more remark- able is the fact that one could have made the same statement in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. When I knocked on Iraj Afshar’s office door in August 1969, he opened that and all the other Persian Studies doors for me in Tehran. Later, back in the States, Ehsan Yarshater made sure the right doors stayed open. As with other projects of theirs, it goes without saying that readers can trust General Introduction to Persian Literature. That said and with the assumption that every student and researcher in Persian Studies has read or will read the book because of whose names appear at the book’s beginning and end, what’s a reviewer to write?

In a three-year cycle, The University of Texas at Austin, where the reviewer teaches, offers Persian literature courses called Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma and the Epic Tradition, Hāfez and Classical Persian Lyric Poetry, ‘Omar Khayyām and His Place in Literature, Rumi and the Persian Sufi Tradition, Sa‘di’s Golestān (The Rose Garden) and Medieval Persian Prose, Nimā Yushij and Modernist Persian Poetry, Sādeq Hedāyat and Modern Persian Fiction, and, under various titles, a course of readings in Persian essay-writing. As cited titles suggest, the courses deal with specific texts situated mostly in the con- text of specific sorts of literary art, among them epic narrative verse, lyric verse, prose nonfiction, and prose fiction. For example, in the Ferdowsi course, alongside reading of the preface, several famous episodes, and the last pages of the book, the class considers Shāhnāma in tandem with secondary

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/187471610X505988 M. C. Hillmann / Journal of Persianate Studies 3 (2010) 128-141 129 epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid. As another example, in the Modernist Persian Poetry course, the class reads a handful of typical traditional(ist) Persian poems, including Constitutional Era texts, and a handful of classic modernist Eng- lish poems to develop a context in which to situate poems by Nimā Yushij, Ahmad Shāmlu, Forugh Farrokhzād, Mehdi Akhavān-e Sāles, Sohrāb Sepehri, and others as modernist in various ways. Secondary source reading in English in these courses includes monographs such as: A. Shahpur Shahbazi’s Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography (1991); Dick Davis’s Epic and Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (2006); L.P. Elwell- Sutton’s translation of Ali Dashti’s In Search of Omar Khayyam (1971); J.T.P. de Bruijn’s Of Piety and Poetry: The Interaction of Religion and Literature in the Life and Work of Hakim Sanā’i of Ghazna (1983); John O’Kane’s translation of Helmut Ritter’s The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid al-Din Attar (2003); Franklin D. Lewis’s Rumi, Past and Pres- ent, East and West: The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalāl al-Din Rumi (2007, 2nd edition); (in lieu of a monograph on the subject) Encyclopedia Iranica’s entry on “Hāfez” (2003); Julie Scott Meisami’s Medieval Persian Court Poetry (1988); Hasan Javadi’s Satire in Persian Literature (1988); Ahmad Karimi- Hakkak’s Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Modernity in Iran (1996); Michael Beard’s Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (1990); Michael Craig Hillmann’s A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry (1987); and Farzaneh Milani’s Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (1992). Assigned course reading to date has not included a history of Persian litera- ture, however, because no methodologically and theoretically up-to-date or even data-up-to-date work has existed. In General Introduction to Persian Literature, the subject of this review, William L. Hanaway, Jr., discusses E.G. Browne’s 4-volume A Literary History of Persia (1902-1924), A.J. Arberry’s Classical Persian Literature (1958), History of Iranian Literature (1968) by Jan Rypka et al., and George Morrison’s edited volume called History of Persian Literature from the Beginning of the Islamic Period to the Present Day (1981). These and other works cited in Hanaway’s “The History of Literature” (Chap- ter 3), beginning with traditional tazkera (biographical sketches) writing, have never resonated with students of literature with literary critical interests. As for coverage of 20th-century Persian literature, students can find valu- able pieces of it, as well as of the history of pre-modern Persian literature, in entries in Encyclopaedia Iranica. But, perhaps more typical of the situation which students of Persian literature have faced is the treatment of literature in the 7th volume of The Cambridge History of Iran (1993). Called From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Peter Avery, G.R.G. Hambly, and Charles Melville,