Essays on Modern Kurdish Literature

Literature, images, and metaphor are often where most of a nation’s history are embedded. A study of modern Kurdish literature highlights a fealty to a rich literary past and a rich source of historiography. The articles in this volume address many facets of the literary in the Kurdish world: proverbs, feminist literature, and resistance in literary works, poetry, prose, etc. In the end, the volume offers a general paradigm of the complex literary framework of the Kurds, their continuous resistance for nationhood in their history, and their modern reinventing of the self. An overview of some of the works in modern Kurdish literature points to both asymmetry and commonality in comparative literary studies. These works highight the thematic reach in Kurdish literary studies.

Alireza Korangy, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; Mahlagha Mortezaee, Independent Scholar, Tehran, Iran

Academic studies on Kurdish literature are meagre in the English language. This volume of original essays fills an undesirable gap in our knowledge about various facets of Kurdish culture and literature. It is an invaluable contribution to Kurdish literary studies, offering a range of kaleidoscopic subjects covering various genres of Kurdish literature, from folklore to modern nationalism, literature as resistance, music as literature, and position of women in Kurdish society. It is a pleasure to recommend this fascinating collection to anyone interested in the literary history of Kurdish people. (Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies, Utrecht University)