Burying the Beloved Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran [Hardcover]

Burying the Belovedtraces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of the real. It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.

This book explores the history of prose fiction in Iran in the context of contemporary legal reforms and examines marriage as a metaphor that unites them. Motlagh's work is compelling and convincing because she avoids simple causal relationships between politics and literature, but instead traces a complex relationship between legal political discourse and literary innovation. Not only is she careful to avoid any causal argument here; she skillfully shows that as discursive formations, law and literature share common underlying motivations, similar parameters, and overlapping concerns . . . Along with describing the gradual normalization of marriage,Burying the Belovedtells another compelling story: a tale about modern and contemporary Iranian narrative style and form . . . Motlagh's book helps us to see how compelling recent art has been in Iran. One of this study's many contributions is that it deftly introduces literary texts and literary culture into this discussion by examining thelsð