A Matter of Taste: The Concept of Style between Early Modern and Modern Persian Literary Criticism

“Style” (sabk/tarz) is a key concept in Persian literary criticism, developed through different approaches by several scholar-poets from the pre-modern to the early modern era. In contemporary scholarship, however, the concept has been somewhat neglected, due to the dominance of western analytical categories (genre, form, etc.), which has led to several simplifications or misunderstandings of sabk, such as reading it as a nationalist framework that asserts Iranian literary preeminence. This paper explores how the concept of style first emerged as a technical term in early modern literary criticism, and how it evolved and was adopted by Muhammad Taqi Bahar (1884-1951), who constitutionalizes the idea of stylistics (sabkshinasi) in the twentieth century. The analysis centers on two critical texts: the Majma’ al Nafa’is, a tazkira written by Khan Arzu (1687-1756), and the Sabkshinasi of Bahar, to examine the trajectory of the notion of sabk and the way it was understood through the centuries, and to situate Bahar’s use of sabk in that long-term history.
I will show that the idea of sabk can be traced back to tazkira writers like Ārzū and his contemporaries, who initiated a discussion of literary styles of speech (tarz-i sukhan) as a characteristic feature of specific poets. This was a new intellectual development that brought together aspects of the tazkira tradition together with manuals on rhetoric (balāghat) in such a way as to produce a new mode of approaching literary discourse using the ghazal as its object of study. Out of this background, I will argue that Bahar’s Sabkshinasi is not oriented along a geographical understanding of Persian literary historiography, as has been previously claimed, but as an attempt to synthesize newly-introduced western literary categories with a long history of indigenous literary criticism. In this light, Bahar’s idea of sabk is a complex and heterogeneous intellectual project, a rich example of the multivalent dynamics of early Iranian modernism.