Persian Literary Devices: Eight Essays

This volume offers a glimpse into the rich tradition of literary devices in Persian language and literature. It establishes an incontrovertible connection between literary devices - figurative language, rhetoric, and so on - and pedagogy and poetics in both written and oral expression. The essays offer a detailed and thorough overview of some of these literary devices and their dynamics, which have helped make the Persian literary tradition a force to reckon with. The essays also carve out a space dedicated to colloquialisms and idioms, as they are interwoven into the fabric of Persian culture— within the larger field of rhetoric. These devices are fostered and furthered in their potency, both culturally and linguistically, by the poets, writers, and rhetoricians who utilize them. The essays highlight a culture and history in texts and oral history that further speak to a culturally tailored complexity as per figurative language, idioms, colloquialisms, and therhetoric they help found and/or re-define.  These discussions and analyses further facilitate an understanding of the epistemological and cultural meaning of some of the constituents of what is otherwise a Persian identity. This work is a must-have for scholars and students of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman, and Urdu literature, not to mention Middle Eastern history and cultural poetics enthusiasts.