Persian Literary Devices: Eight Essays

This volume offers a glimpse into the rich tradition of literary devices in Persian language and literature. It establishes an incontrovertible connection between literary devices - figurative language, rhetoric, and so on - and pedagogy and poetics in both written and oral expression. The essays offer a detailed and thorough overview of some of these literary devices and their dynamics, which have helped make the Persian literary tradition a force to reckon with. The essays also carve out a space dedicated to colloquialisms and idioms, as they are interwoven into the fabric of Persian culture- within the larger field of rhetoric. These devices are fostered and furthered in their potency, both culturally and linguistically, by the poets, writers, and rhetoricians who utilize them. The essays highlight a culture and history in texts and oral history that further speak to a culturally tailored complexity as per figurative language, idioms, colloquialisms, and the rhetoric they help found and/or re-define. These discussions and analyses further facilitate an understanding of the epistemological and cultural meaning of some of the constituents of what is otherwise a Persian identity. This work is a must-have for scholars and students of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman, and Urdu literature, not to mention Middle Eastern history and cultural poetics enthusiasts.

Auteur

Alireza Korangy received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His field of research is classical Persian and Arabic philology with a special emphasis on poetics, rhetoric, folklore and linguistics.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is a literary translator and Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Processing Compound Verbs in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Complex Predicates (Leiden University Press 2014) and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (VDM Verlag 2009), and editor or co-editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020), The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022), and The Art of Teaching Persian Literature: From Theory to Practice (Brill 2024).

Azadeh Vatanpour is a Ph.D. (ABD) candidate at Emory University. She holds an MA in Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages from Shiraz University, an MA in Folk Studies, and an MA in Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University. As a scholar of religion and minority studies, her research focuses on ethno-religious minority groups in the Middle East, particularly among the Yarsan community. Vatanpour is currently working on Essays on Gurani Literature, Edited Volume with Dr. Alireza Korangy, delving into the extensive repertoire of literature written in the Gurani language by various ethno-religious groups residing in the Zagros region. She is the Director of the Program of Persian Studies at University of Austin.