ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on four articulations of Persian literary nationalism that range from arguing for Iran to adopt a modern national literary sensibility to positing a national literature distinct from its modern European counterparts. Within the early phases of modern Persian literary history, the relationship between literature and nation-building points to the emergence of an understanding of literature as a "force for bringing about a substantive political transformation". The conflation of official nationalism and nostalgia for a lost empire, although top-down, did not go unacknowledged by all Iranians. An intellectual and scholar displaced by the 1979 Revolution, the late Meskoob explains in the preface to the Persian edition of the collected essays that the impetus for the volume was a discussion he attended in Paris on the subject of "Language, Nationality, and Autonomy". From its inception modern Persian literature has been put in the service of raising awareness about, articulating, and upholding a cohesive national identity.
