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Interrelation of History and Nationhood in Contemporary Persian Historical Fiction

Masoud Farahmandfar, Musa Abdollahi

UDC 82(55)-94

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.6s-22.123   

 

Masoud Farahmandfar,

Doctor, Member of the Academic Council

Allameh Tabatabaee University (Tehran, Iran)

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8194-6719

Scopus Author ID: 57194577066

e-mail: masoudfarahmandfar@gmail.com

Musa Abdollahi,

Doctor, Member of the Academic Council

Allameh Tabatabaee University (Tehran, Iran)

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0345-5732

e-mail: mabdollahi82@yahoo.com

 

The present article discusses how terrains of belonging are constructed and articulated textually through historical novels which bring the past into the present, and link the national identity of people to memories of their ancestors, to their nation’s glorious past. The rise of the historical novel in Iran was concomitant with Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which was hailed by many a critic and historian as a major time of sociopolitical awakening which contributed to protecting the cultural legacies of the past and keeping aglow the propitious light of belonging and nationhood. Historiography has been a fecund ground for Iranian fiction-writers in which to retrieve a sense of national identity. This article aims at showing how Persian historical novels foreground the symbiotic relationship between remembering and belonging, and open up texts to their national significances.

Keywords: Persian historical novel, the nation, the Constitutional Revolution, historiography.

 

References

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