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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
When a historian decides to use literary texts to help construct a past, these texts can present some interesting theoretical and methodological problems. One theoretical question that concerns both historians and literary scholars is that of genre. Generic considerations are of primary importance for the historian as he or she sifts through such diverse kinds of material as personal diaries, government documents, field reports of inspection teams, and books of doctrine or practice. The historian knows what to expect of each sort of document and by virtue of this familiarity is able to notice, for example, unexpected additions, omissions, or subtle deviations from the expected norms. This awareness of generic considerations often becomes second nature to us as we work with familiar types of material.
But, alas, the specialized fields and disciplinary training of historians and literary scholars can obscure for them the generic characteristics of texts that they do not ordinarily work with.
1. ‘Ali, Mohammad, al-mamalek, Naqib, Amīr Arsalan, ed. Mahjub, Mohammad Ja'far (Tehran, 1340 S./1961)Google Scholar.
2. E.g., Dostoni Amir Hamza (Dushanbe: Niyaz, 1992). See also Pritchett, Frances W., The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamza (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and her Marvelous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and Hindi (New Delhi: Manohar, 1985).
3. A recent example of this sort of romance is the novel King of the Benighted by Irani, Manuchehr (Washington, D.C.: Mage, 1991). The author uses the first tale of Nizami's Haft paykar as the basic structure of the narrative, but transposes it to modern-day TehranGoogle Scholar.
4. For a survey of this literature, see Ch.-H. de Fouchécour, Moralia: les notions morales dans la littérature persane du 3el9e au 7ell3e siecle (Paris: Éditions Recherché sur les Civilisations, 1986).
5. Shāhnāma, ed. E. Bertels et al., 9 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966-71), 4: 8-9.
6. See Page, Mary Ellen, “Naqqali and Ferdowsi,” Ph.D. dissertation, (University of Pennsylvania, 1977)Google Scholar.
