Feminine Intervention: Early Qajar Women Poets and their Engagement with the Bazgasht-I Adabi

Abstract:

Conventional scholarship has very little to say about the involvement of women poets in the trajectory of the neoclassical Bazgasht-i adabi (“literary return movement”) in early Qajar Iran. Overlooked in the scholarship or dismissed as marginal, the evidence presented in this lecture will show that, as the process of the institutionalisation of the Bazgasht-i adabi accelerated in Tehran, there existed women poets active in literary communities beyond the new capital whose poetry was progressing in line with the court-sponsored aesthetic parameters.

Bio:

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Oxford, and Senior Research Fellow in Persian at Wadham College.