Character of the Literary Renaissance

Abstract

Economic and cultural contact with the occident, which since the middle of the 19th century has increased in width and intensity, was one of the main factors in initiating the transformation of many countries of the orient, among them Iran, from the traditional to the modern way of life. Literature was also affected by this trend. The knowledge of European languages and literatures, western education, with its opening up of new possibilities in technology, natural science, and the social sciences, and the reflection of all this in everyday life, is for Iranian literature a discovery in the light of which truths accepted as immutable for thousands of years collapse and the existing social order appears as what it is — a mediaeval survival. The critical attitude towards national reality, once awakened, is further cultivated and reveals inadequacies of a fundamental character, investigates their causes and thinks out ways of removing them. This forms the main stream of the literature of this period — a literature that is tendentious and militant, addressed to the broad masses of the nation, with the aim of educating, instructing and awakening them from their backwardness and passivity. The best poets of the country, where from time immemorial the masters of the word had composed qaṣīdas in praise of the ruling dynasty and court and sent them with enthusiastic dedications to their monarchs, now placed all their art in the service of the struggle to limit and finally overthrow the monarchal power, and of the enlightenment and liberation of their fellow-citizens. This is the first novum forming the dividing-line between modern and traditional literature, and pointing to the new trend in which the poet no longer aims to create for a small aristocratic circle, but for the broad masses of the nation.