Title: Nation and Novel: A Study of Persian & Kurdish Narrative Discourse.
Author: Hashem Ahmadzadeh
Place of publication: Uppsala
Publisher: Uppsala Universitet
Release date: 2003

This is a doctoral dissertation. The emergence of nation-states in the Middle East during the early decades of the new 20th Century is more or less parallel to the emergence of a new narrative discourse, i.e. the novel. This almost simultaneous emergence raises a question as to whether there are some reciprocal relationships between the emergence of the nation-state and the novel. This study deals with the genre of the novel in Persian and Kurdish literature. It focuses on the rise of the novel and the factors which bring about its emergence and fuel its development. By reviewing the contribution of specific theorists towards the analysis and clarification of the emergence of the novel, it attempts to provide a theoretical basis for the study of the rise of the novel in Kurdish and Persian literature.
Through a close reading of ten specific Persian and Kurdish novels, the author intends to describe their different novelistic worlds. This study investigates the various aspects of political, social and cultural characteristics and their changing processes in the worlds of the Persian and Kurdish novels. In the Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson revises his theory concerning the affinity between the novel and the rise of nations, originating from Imagined Communities. He argues that the intimate relationship between the novel and the nation becomes strained in the second half of the 20th century. The present study attempts to investigate whether this affinity in the case of the Kurdish and Persian novels has also become strained, or whether it is still intact. [1]