Missing Persians
Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History

Cloth $34.95L    |   0-8156-2753-X    |   2001

Paper $19.95s    |   0-8156-2837-4    |   2001

This book eloquently uncovers voices that have gone unheard and are "missing" from Persian literature and cultural history.

Description
"Missing Persians" serves to articulate in elegant, vibrant prose the disparate, dispersed, and displaced narratives of five Persian subjects. Nasrin Rahimieh’s complex and nuanced arguments effectively demonstrate her five figures’s links to a stable Persian identity—complicated by their experiences of travel, exile, conversion, and social change.

Rahimieh delineates the captivating histories of "missing" Persians from the sixteenth century to modern times, and defines the arbitrary genetic boundaries that isolate Persian biographies, autobiographies, travelogues, and social histories. In her analysis, the author daringly and insightfully calls into question Western concepts of discipline.

Even as it sheds new light on crucial points in cultural self-definition, Missing Persians offers a fresh look at traditional institutions, the role of women, and Persia’s turbulent struggle to enter modernity on its own terms.

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Author
Nasrin Rahimieh is associate dean of arts and professor of comparative literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Oriental Responses to the West: Comparative Essays in Select Writers from the Muslim World.

6 x 9, 208 pages, glossary, index