Abstract
This chapter examines how twentieth century Iranian readers situated Jane Eyre within the classical genre of romance literature (adabiyāt-i ʿāshiqāna), originating from the tradition of love narratives in verse (ʿishq-nāma) pioneered by the twelfth century Persian poet Nizami Ganjevi. While romance is only one among several of the original Jane Eyre’s modes of generic belonging, translation and reception of Jane Eyre into Persian facilitated the novel’s generic re-calibration. We show how the prohibition on romance literature following the 1979 Iranian revolution made way for foreign classics such as Jane Eyre to be read as romances in the classical sense of the term. Drawing on morphological and narratological studies on the structure of the Persian romance, we read Jane Eyre through the lens of Nizami’s romances in our reconstruction of the Iranian reader’s horizon of expectation. This research establishes how prismatic Persian translations contributed to the novel’s generic transformation of world literary history.
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