Integrated Literary Cultures in Anatolia and the Premodern World

FAIN: FA-233396-16

Michael Bedrosian Pifer
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

A book-length study of the “gharib,” or stranger, in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Armenian literature in Anatolia during the 13th-15th centuries.
 

My proposed book project, 'The Stranger’s Voice,' intervenes in central debates within Comparative Literature on the connectivity of pre-modern literary cultures. In particular, it focuses on the migration of a single concept, the gharib, meaning stranger or foreigner, across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Armenian literatures in Anatolia during the 13th-15th centuries. I suggest that the ubiquitous gharib, which cuts across Islamic, Christian, and Jewish texts, still has relevance today because it serves as a potent figure for understanding what is fundamentally non-native and even cosmopolitan about literary production itself.  Therefore, in telling the story of the ever-wandering stranger, this study seeks to shed light on a much larger question:  how and why literary conventions traveled beyond the orbit of any single people or language before our own globally interconnected age.
 

Associated Products

Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (Book)
Title: Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia
Author: Michael Pifer
Abstract: By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a region of stunning cultural diversity, home not only to Armenians and Greeks, but also to Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Jews, and others. Kindred Voices explores how the Muslim and Christian poets of Anatolia grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of religious instruction to their intermingled communities. This unique, under-studied convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem. Although these poets were later constructed as foundational figures in their own “national” literary histories, they first emerged, before the rise of the Ottomans, from a shared and fraught terrain.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250398/kindred-voices
Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300250398
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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