Hedayat's Blind Owl as a Western Novel by Michael Beard

Hedayat's Blind Owl as a Western Novel by Michael Beard

The Iranian writer Sadeq Hedayat is the most influential figure in twentieth-century Persian fiction--and the object of a kind of cult after his suicide in 1951. His masterpiece The Blind Owl is the most important novel of modern Iran. Its abrupt, tortured opening sentence, "There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker," is one of the best known and most frequently recited passages of modern Persian. But underneath the book's uncanniness and its narrative eccentricities, Michael Beard traces an elegant pastiche of familiar Western traditions. A work of advocacy for a disturbing and powerful piece of fiction, his comprehensive analysis reveals the significance of The Blind Owl as a milestone not only for Persian writing but also for world literature. The international, decentered nature of modernist writing outside the West, typified by Hedayat's European education and wide reading in the Western canon, suggested to Beard the strategy of assessing The Blind Owl as if it were a Western novel. Viewed in this context, Hedayat's intricate chronicle challenges the very notion of a national literature, rethinking and reshaping our traditions until we are compelled, "through its eyes," to see them in a new way. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Henri Zoghaib is a Lebanese poet with many books to his credit, including poetry, criticism, and translation. Born in Lebanon (1948), he has been a principal monitor of many cultural circles in his country, where he founded the poetry magazine L'Odyssee (1982). His collection Love Poems In Forbidden Time, translated by Adnan Haydar
and Michael Beard, was published in 1991 by New Pen Bond Publishers in Washington, D.C.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691630632
ISBN 10	0691630631
Title	Hedayat's Blind Owl as a Western Novel
Author	Michael Beard
Series	Princeton Legacy Library
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2016-04-19
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.