Michael Pifer

Kathryn Babayan

This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow, national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines the borders of the “Armenian,” pointing to a fresh vision for the field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply interconnected, and rich with possibility.

Words and Worlds in Motion

An Armenian Mediterranean

The fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia’s multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.

A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia

Kindred Voices

The fascinating story of how premodern Anatolia's multireligious intersection of cultures shaped its literary languages and poetic masterpieces By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Kindred Voices explores how the region's Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multireligious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period's literature to reach new and wider audiences. This is the first book to study the era's major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.

Michael Pifer

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