A History of Middle Eastern Modernism

Levi Thompson is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Levi's first book, Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry (2022), won the inaugural edition of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies.

• Part I. Adab: 1. The spirit of the letter: Adab and Ottoman Turkish modernity Mehtap Ozdemir; 2. Parsing the nation: Bahār and the rise of Adabiyāt Aria Fani; 3. Adab, the Nahḍah, and the modern sensibility Ziad Dallal; Part II. Poetry: 4. Brand new: Turkish poetry and aesthetic autonomy on the modernist periphery Kenan Behzat Sharpe; 5. Reassessing Abdulla Goran's contribution to Kurdish poetic modernity Amr Taher Ahmed; 6. How romantic: rewriting the history of modern Arabic poetry Emily Drumsta; Part III. Prose: 7. Modern automatons with a modernist style: machine-people in Halide Edib's Masks or Souls? And the machine-writer in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute C. Ceyhun Arslan and Şima İmşir; 8. Ṣādiq Hidāyat and modernist prose in Persian Levi Thompson; 9. The roots of Arabic literary modernism and modernist prose Brady Patrick Ryan; Part IV. Politics: 10. Imperialism and literary modernism in the Turkish Republic Kaitlin Staudt; 11. Cold War modernism: the book translation program of the Unites States Information Agency (USIA) in Afghanistan and Iran Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam; 12. Franklin Books and modernism in Baghdad Levi Thompson; Part V. Aesthetics: 13. A syncretic modernism: the Turkish striving for a painterly synthesis Duygu Demir; 14. Aporias of modernist aesthetics in Pahlavi Iran Maziyar Faridi; 15. Colonial modernity and modernist aesthetics in the Arab world Haytham Bahoora; Part VI. Easterlies:16. Turkish modernism's Soviet courses Nergis Ertürk; 17. Eastern Communist itineraries: Persianate poetic modernity beyond modernism Samuel Hodgkin; 18. Modern conventions, homoerotic heritage: sexuality in Persian and Urdu literary historiography Alexander Jabbari; Part VII. Comparison: 19. The entanglements of modernisation and literary modernism in Turkey Burcu Alkan and Çimen Günay-Erkol; 20. Race, gender, and patriotic performance in Simin Daneshvar's modernist fiction Marie Ostby; 21. Revival modernities and the modernist present Shir Alon.