Description

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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.

About the Author

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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).