Hossein Ziai

Professor of Islamic and Iranian Studies and Director of Iranian Studies, UCLA

Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetics

This work centers on classical Persian poetics, primarily the epic art of Ferdowsi’s Shahnama. It combines traditional literary approaches with new comparative methods, especially those developed by Albert B. Lord in his ethnographic fieldwork on living oral traditions and by Georges Dumézil in his linguistic analysis of thematic parallelisms between heroes of epic and gods of myth and ritual.

  • © Hossein Ziai 2012