Abstracts Category : Other

The Inside Outdoors: Return(s) to Nature in Urdu and Anglophone Poetry

by Fatima Burney Burney

This dissertation examines the reception of Urdu and Persian ghazal poetry in primitivist scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While seventeenth and early eighteenth-century poets writing in Urdu or Persian would have regarded the Indo-Persian ghazal as a cosmopolitan literary tradition, starting in the eighteenth century, scholars begin to represent ghazal conventions in naturalistic terms that seek to imagine it as a folk tradition. I highlight the discourses of nature in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglophone and Urdu literary scholarship to illustrate the particular challenges that writers faced in assessing the ghazal by primitivist standards of authentic expression. I demonstrate how the reengineering of the ghazal towards more natural expression sought to transform ghazal poetry into a literary tradition that represented its people.