Genres Without Borders: the Circulation of Iranian Literary Forms

Literary cultures are inherently mobile, at times transgressing and disregarding, and at others reconstituting, cultural and national boundaries. Genres and literary forms, too, are vehicles for the mobility of ideas that strike chords in cultures and locales far from their origins. In Genres Without Borders, Marie Ostby examines twentieth-century Iranian literature and the hybrid genres and innovative constructions it has taken to reveal how these tensile modes move and shift across transnational space to European and American contexts.

Ostby argues that, despite censorship and political isolation, Iranian literature has thrived across borders through strategic transformations in genre and form that emerged in response to these very constraints. Drawing on Persian miniature painting, travelogues, political cartoons, and social media, alongside more traditional literary forms, such as ghazal poetry, she traces their cross-border circulation that makes Persianate culture legible to Euro-American readers while maintaining a distinctive voice. Iranian writers don’t simply adapt to Western expectations but actively reshape how global readers understand literary possibility. In this way, the crossing of cultural boundaries is both mirrored and embodied in the crossing of genre boundaries, connecting these writers to a world literary culture despite accelerating political attempts to isolate them.