Imagology of Persia: Constructing This Culture in Western Literary Discourse
Abstract
This paper examines the imagological construction of Persia in Western literary discourse, probing the literary images and cultural narratives that have shaped, and at times distorted, the West’s perception of this ancient civilization. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of imagology and Orientalism, the study situates literary representations of Persia within broader historical, cultural and ideological contexts, revealing how literary texts have both reflected and contributed to Western imaginaries of the “Persian Other”. Imagology, as a subfield of comparative literature concerned with the study of cross‑national perceptions and literary stereotypes, provides the conceptual lens through which these constructions can be scrutinized as social and textual phenomena rather than fixed ethnographic realities.
Western literary engagements with Persia extend from early encounters in Renaissance poetry and travel narratives to the Romantic and Victorian eras, where Persia often appears as exotic, mystical or politically subdued, embodying the fantasies and anxieties of its Western interpreters. Renaissance authors such as Edmund Spenser drew on inherited classical and travel motifs to portray Persia in ways that served varying ideological agendas, while Romantic poets and novelists developed portrayals of Persia as an idyllic yet decadent realm, shaped by colonial imaginaries and aesthetic exoticization.
This paper argues that these representations are neither homogeneous, nor static; rather, they are dynamic textual constructions influenced by shifting power relations, translation practices and cultural encounters. The interplay between Western literary imagination and Persian literary presence has moreover been mediated through key texts such as Les Lettres Persanes by Montesquieu, where Persian figures function as reflective devices for European self‑critique, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, whose Victorian popularity significantly molded Western literary images of Persian poetic sensibility.
By tracing these literary imaginaries alongside their historical and ideological contexts, this paper seeks to highlight the complex relations between literature, national image and cultural power, and to suggest pathways toward a more historically grounded and dialogic understanding of Iran in Western literary discourse.
