Alexander Jabbari
This chapter turns to the Persianate tazkirah tradition to show how the shared discourse of literary modernization, with its inherent nationalism and Victorian-influenced puritanism, led modernizers to work together to remake their shared Persianate heritage and create chaste, heteronormative, nationally bounded literary histories. These literary histories, produced as they most often were for modernizing educational institutions, likely not only reflected changing conventions but also played a pedagogical role in spreading them. The generations who began to receive a modern education grew up writing poetry differently under such influences. In this way, the modernizing conventions that were first developed or deployed by literary historians impacted other genres of Persianate literature.