Report on the historical details of a number of neglected storytellers in Iran and South Asia from the 16th to 17th centuries CE, including Zain al-‘Ābidīn Takaltū Khān, ‘Ināyat Allāh Darbār Khān, Fusūnī Yazdī, Mīr Muḥammad Hāshim, Iskandar Qiṣṣah-khẉān, Ḥājī Qiṣṣah-khẉān Hamadānī, Niẓām Shīrāzī, Mīr Qiṣṣah, Muḥammad…[Read more]

Describes the storytelling techniques of the 17th-century storyteller (qissah-khwan) ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini in South Asia and discusses the truth/falsehood binary in the context of the qissah/dastan genre.

Translation of Mīrzā Asad Allāh Ḳhān Ġhālib’s 1866 Urdu preface to the dāstān Bostān-i Ḳhayāl.

This chapter examines how twentieth century Iranian readers situated Jane Eyre within the classical genre of romance literature (adabiyāt-i ʿāshiqāna), originating from the tradition of love narratives in verse (ʿishq-nāma) pioneered by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjevi. While romance is only one among several of the original Jane…[Read more]

Line breaks are arguably the defining feature of poetry, in the absence of which a text becomes prose. Consequently, the translation of line breaks is a decisive issue for every poetry translator. Classical and modern literary theorists have argued that the potential for enjambment, which we understand as the effect that makes line breaks possible…[Read more]

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a new style of Persian poetry was developing in the Persianate world, several erudite literary critics appeared in India, whose meticulous critiques of Persian poetry was unprecedented in the long history of Persian literature. A close study of the works produced by these critics reveals their vast…[Read more]

What follows is a talk I gave (over zoom) on June 29, 2022, for the London Rare Book School and the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and mildly revised in the transcript I posted on my blog on September 7, 2022. It was an opportunity for me to talk about the work I’ve been doing on feminist bibliography over the past couple of…[Read more]

Peter Jordan war von 1531 bis 1535 als Buchdrucker in Mainz aktiv. In seiner Presse entstanden zum einen gegenreformatorische Schriften wie eine Schmähschrift gegen Luther, Predigten und eine deutsche Bibelübersetzung, zum anderen aber auch deutschsprachige Wissens- und Gebrauchstexte, bspw. zum Kurbaden, zur Tintenherstellung, zur K…[Read more]

Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the 19th century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here…[Read more]

This article examines the temporality of interlinear translation through a case study of the rendering of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into Persian. We argue that, in its adherence to the word order of the original, the interlinear crib prioritizes the temporality of the instant (kairos) over the temporality of the linear sequence (chronos). Ka…[Read more]

In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stage. The director and playwright Amir-Reza Koohestani (b. 1978) created a production that was faithful to the classic status of this text while also maximizing its resonance with a contemporary Iranian audience. I explore how Koohestani achieved this b…[Read more]

This article describes the development of the typographical phenomenon of “small capitals” during the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century.

Scaleboard, thin strips or leaves of wood, was used in printing for various purposes, notably to provide interlinear spacing, as well as in bookbinding. This article explores the nature, manufacture and history of scaleboard, and its uses inside and outside the printing industry from the late medieval period to the turn of the twentieth century.

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. I propose the methodology of…[Read more]

The year 2020 marks the bicentenary of a revolution in the manner in which books were published in England, and soon enough around the world, for 1820 was the year in which the first publisher’s binding in cloth probably appeared. The first books published in cloth are often said to be the series of miniature, diamond-type ‘classics’ issued in Lo…[Read more]