Chapter 2 - Canons

Summary

This chapter considers civic newspaper poetry in Persian and Azerbaijani Turkic as a site for the establishment of a new radical politics and poetics of representation during and after the entangled Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions of 1905–1911. In the historiography of Persian and Central Asian literature, these revolutions are generally considered to be catalysts for a literary modernity engaged with European models and genres. This chapter shows how the poetics of new modes of political representation came to be articulated in classical and folk verse forms (qasida, ghazal, lullaby) that had preexisting repertories of tools for establishing, negotiating, and contesting claims to representational legitimacy. Surveying the main types of periodicals (newspaper, literary journal, satirical journal), the chapter shows how poets developed different styles for different venues, focusing on ‘Ali-akbar Sabir, lead poet of the Azerbaijani satirical journal Mulla Nasreddin. The chapter next considers how poets reworked court panegyric to glorify the parliaments and revolutionary parties that contested royal sovereignty, focusing on the newspaper verse of the Iranian poets Abu al-Qasim Lahuti and Adib al-Mamalik. Lastly, the chapter follows the transfer of the allegorical patriotic lullaby from Azerbaijan to Iran, focusing on the role of the Iranian publisher Nasim-i Shumal.