"Persian Literature and Modernity recasts the history of modern literature in Iran by elucidating the bonds between the classical tradition and modernity and exploring textual, generic and discursive formations through heterodoxical investigations. This is first done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition, including the munåazirah (debate), Ahråiman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical aloneness) and nåarizåayatåi (discontent). Following this are broader structural and processual treatments, including the early formation of the genre of the social novel, the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse in Iran. The book offers a paradigm shift in the historicization of modern Persian literature by supplanting the ideologically determined category of the modern with a historically grounded understanding of modernity. Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, the chapters in this volume make a case for stepping outside the bounds of orthodox literary scholarship in Iranian studies with its associated political and orientalist determinants in order to provide a more nuanced conception of literary modernity in Iran. Offering an alternative reading of modernity in Persian literature, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in Modern Persian literature and Iranian Studies"--