Married to modernity: Gender, fiction and reform in twentieth-century Iran

This dissertation argues that the reconstruction of gender and literary genres in twentieth-century Iran proceeded together, and proposes that these transformations facilitated one another even as they shared many of the same confusions. Drawing upon semiological notions of social and linguistic 'codes', this study suggests that in twentieth-century Iran, the new genre of fiction and its 'realistic' representations were central to the re-organization of national and gender identity. In the texts I examine, which date from the late constitutional period to the present, I focus on how changing ideals for gender and citizenship were made comprehensible through their reiteration in fiction. I argue that fictional texts taught readers to understand these new orientations of gender as valid by educating them to believe in realistic fiction as a genuine mimetic reflection of social and political life. This contradicted earlier modes of readership, which were primarily oriented towards poetry, and at the same time also assumed a growing national readership that crossed ethnic and religious boundaries. Focusing on four figures (or literary 'codes') that recur in the fiction of the twentieth century (the female beloved, the companion-wife, the female domestic servant, and the ethno-religious other), I use a diachronic approach to view these codes as they are utilized within literary texts as well as their role in the changing semiosphere of Iranian culture.