Manuscript, text and literature

This book is a selected collection of the scholarly production on Middle and New Persian literature by professor emeritus Bo Utas, Uppsala University, presented to him on his 70th birthday, with an introduction and an index by Carina Jahani. Out of 19 articles, 15 are in English and four (four entries in Dictionnaire universel des littératures) in French. Of special interest is a long article entitled ‘‘Genres in Persian literature 900 to 1900’’ which includes a discussion of what literature is, how oral and written literature are defined and how different genres in Persian literature have developed. The article on New Persian prosody discusses how Arabic and Middle Iranian elements have merged in New Persian poetry. Several articles are dedicated to the influence from Sufism on the Classical Persian poetry, particularly the works of Abdullah Ansari and the Savanih of Ahmad Ghazali. The manuscript tradition and the contents of the ‘‘journey to the other world’’ described in Misbah ul-arvah are he subjects of two separate studies. The traditional attribution of this work to Auhad al-Din Kirmani is also questioned. There are, furthermore, papers discussing Greco-Persian literary contacts reflected in the Persian romantic epos Vamiq u ‘Azra, the concepts of war and peace in Iran, non-religious Book Pahlavi literature, the aesthetic use of New Persian, and Modern Persian literature, particularly prose literature during the first half of the 20th century. The articles on application of a stemmatic method in Persian manuscript edition and the possibility of using a computerized method for the construction of stemmas are also of particular theoretical interest. The four entries in ‘‘Dictionnaire universel des littératures’’ are on Farid al-Din Attar, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Sana’i-yi Ghaznavi and Sufism.