Persian Prison Poem

Professor of Islamic World and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is author of Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016).

With eloquent translations of key medieval Persian poets into English for the first time, the book is an important addition to the field of not just Middle Eastern literature, but medieval and comparative literature as a whole. [...] In writing this book, Gould has, herself, shaken up the genre of literary scholarship [...].

• Maps, Tables, IllustrationsA Prison Poem LexiconChronologyIntroduction: The Persian Poet’s Bodies: Towards a Corporeal PoeticsThe Prison Poem as a Transgressive GenreThe Corporeal Poetics of the Lyric OdeBorderland Conflicts, Cosmological ComplaintsThe Prison Poet as King and ProphetCrucifixion as CritiqueThe Sovereign and the Poet’s BodyEpilogue: Incarceration, Metonomy, ModernityAppendix I. Khaqani’s Six Prison PoemsBibliography