"A Millennium Of Classical Persian Poetry" is a guide to the reading & understanding of Persian poetry from the tenth to the twentieth century.

Reprint of a classic text, this volume gives an insight into the rebirth of national literature in the national language and traces the course of its development and full maturity from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century.

Focuses on the poems rather than on their authors. Surveys the development of Persian mystical poetry, dealing first with the relation between Sufism and literature and then with the four main genres of the tradition: the epigram, the homiletic poem, love poetry and symbolic narrative.

I.B.Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation

The third volume in this ground-breaking series, Persian Narrative Poetry in the Classical Era, 800-1500: Romantic and Didactic Genres, introduces masterpieces of Persian literature from these seven centuries to an international audience. In the process, it underlines the remarkable tenacity of their malleable tradition: the perennial dialogue and the interconnectedness which binds together a vast and varied literature composed of many threads, romantic and didactic, in many lands, from Anatolia and Iran to India and Central Asia. In its companion volume, Persian Lyric in the Classical Era, 800-1500, the readers of the series will have already met in passing all the mythical and historical figures who appear with far more aplomb on the stage here, with their lives narrated in detail by poets of different caliber from different perspectives. The first two chapters of this volume recount the literary history of the entire period, focusing on didactic and romantic narratives. The central chapters take a closer look at the towering figure of the poet Nezâmi Ganjavi. The final chapter takes the reader to a wider landscape tracing the footsteps of Alexander across the globe, offering insights to the cultural preoccupations refracted in so many versions past and present.

First published in 1958, this work by one of Britain’s most celebrated Orientalist scholars, tells the story of the rebirth of national literature in Persia after the fall of the Sᾱsᾱnian empire in the seventh century. It traces the course of this literature’s development and full maturity from the ninth century to the end of the fifteenth century and looks at a number of important writers including the Saljῡq poets, Rῡmῑ, ῌᾱfiz and Jᾱmῑ. This work will be of interest to those studying Persian and Middle-Eastern literature and history.