This book fills a void in the field of pre-modern literature written in Persian. It is the first scholarly publication in English language on and around the poet Nizami Ganjavi written by important Western and Non-Western scholars, enriching the field with an awareness of their knowledge and research interests.
The multidisciplinary volume initiates a much-needed dialogue it initiates a much-needed dialogue between the metropolitan and postcolonial academic points of view.
By the example of Nizami's poems it shows how different academic circles interpret Medieval authors in relation to modern-day national identity and national cultures. Unlike in Europe and USA, in the USSR citizenship and ethnicity, like two modern official different criteria of identity, became a stumbling block in the division of cultural heritage of the past. Irredentism is a central topic in the post-Soviet Union world and gives a voice to the peripheral rather than to the metropolis with its colonial arguments. The richness and usefulness of this volume is that the contributions that take this innovative standpoint are put side by side with others, which remain within the traditional literary analysis and examine Nizami's creative thoughts on human, society, women, or justice.
About the Author: Rahilya Geybullayeva holds a PhD (1989) from Lomonosov Moscow State University and is the founder of the Azerbaijan Comparative Literature Association. She is a recipient of UNESCO, Carnegie, and Fulbright Fellowships; served as a visiting scholar at SOAS University of London (Intercultural Dialogue Regular Programme), at the Comparative Literature Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA (project "Conception of National Literature"), at the Berkeley University of California (Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies), and at the Anthropology Department of Harvard University. Her ongoing project is identity through the prism of Past in the future: rules to follow at the Anthropology Department, Harvard University.
Christine van Ruymbeke holds a PhD (1997) in Persian studies from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and taught for several years at her home university before moving to Cambridge in 2002. She is Ali Reza and Muhamed Soudavar Reader in Persian literature and culture at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in Cambridge (UK). She is a fellow, tutor and the college praelector at Darwin College, University of Cambridge (UK). She is a long-standing member of the councils of multiple learned societies, including the Royal Asiatic and Ancient India and Iran Trust. She works on classical (medieval and pre-modern) Persian literature, with a special focus on the masnavis of Nezami of Ganja (12th c. AD) and on the Persian versions of the Kalila and Dimna fables (12th-16th c. AD).
