Kevin L. Schwartz's Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 takes a fresh approach to discussing the “literary return” (bāzgasht-e adabī) school of poetry that reached its zenith at the Qajar court of Fath ʿAlī Shāh (1772–1834). Schwartz frees the discussion of this era from the framework of stylistics and nationalism and considers the concept of literary return as an extra-national phenomenon, focusing on “literary communities debating and engaging an open-ended canon according to their own social and political contexts” in Iran, Afghanistan, and India (23). In doing so, he upends the conventional scholarly narrative, shedding new light on historical details and providing a model for further research.

The book is divided into an introduction and four chapters, the first examining the place of literary return within the historiographical discourse and the other three offering case studies from Iran, Afghanistan, and India. The introduction stresses the importance of biographical dictionaries (tazkireh) as a means of “exploring the social bonds among communities of poets” (23) as well as revealing how poets related to the larger community. Schwartz mines certain biographical dictionaries to create graphical aids he calls “network maps.”

The first chapter explores the tendency among Persian poets in Iran, Afghanistan, and India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to past masters of the canon. It opens with a review of Muhammad Taqī Bahār's conceptualization of the literary return school and the so-called Indian style (sabk-e Hindī). Schwartz recognizes that Bahār “leveraged” the tazkireh genre to “shape a narrative of Persian literature's development” and notes that Bahār shifted the focus from an international body of Persian literature “into a narrative of Iranian literary history ” (37, emphasis in the original). Contrasted with this new Iranian literature was the Indian style. Schwartz characterizes Bahār's view of the Indian style as “Persian poetry gone astray and in decline” (38). He argues that Bahār's portrayal of literary development as a cultural conflict divided by national borders interrupted our understanding of how poets responded to the events of their day and interacted with the canonical body of Persian literature. Although Schwartz relies on Bahār's Sabkshenāsī for his argument, that work was explicitly intended as a history of Persian prose. Although the text supports Schwartz's argument, he makes fewer references to Bahār's writings addressing poetic stylistics.

Schwartz then examines evidence for the existence of a literary return school of poets in Iran. Looking at literary biographies and anthologies by authors such as Lotf ʿAlī “Āzar” Baygdelī (d. 1781) and Rezā Qolī Khān Hedāyat (d. 1871), Schwartz traces the roots of the historiographical process that reduced the complex “social and historical circumstances of post-Safavid Isfahan” to a simplistic narrative that served as “a crucial linchpin in the story of Iranian literary salvation” (48). He addresses the paradox of the depiction of literary return as both revival and mimicry by Hedāyat and later critics. Of course, portraying the poetry of the era as such allowed poets of the early twentieth century (like Bahār) to break with tradition while also positioning themselves as the true guardians of Iran's literary heritage.

In Afghanistan and India, the concept of literary return is detached from Iranian nationalism. Modern scholars of Afghan poetry debate the existence of a coherent movement, although that debate has largely been shaped by the model for discussing literary return in Iran: poets imitating older styles “at the expense of other styles across state and society.” This model, Schwartz argues, ignores the social environment in which the Iranian school was nurtured and assumes a “coherent assembly of poets” (57). Removing the idea of literary return from the conception of a literary school in geographical proximity, perhaps with the patronage of a court, and considering it as a trend in a larger arena “allows for assessing engagement with the masters in the nineteenth century as a feature and function of textual production and circulation” (57). Schwartz takes as his point of reference the genre of Afghan “war-ballads” (jangnāmeh) that described the events of the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) in the style of Ferdawsī's Shāhnāmeh.

In the case of South Asia, discussions of literary return have been subsumed into a narrative of the decline of the Persian language in the face of British policies promoting English, as well as “the growing usage of Urdu as a means of literary expression” (59). British involvement with the Mughal successor states gave rise to an English-speaking class of administrative secretaries (monshi), replacing Persian as the administrative language. Schwartz describes this phenomenon within a broader trend in which the “prevalence and practice of Persian administrative norms were slowly being phased out.” As for the rise of Urdu literature, Schwartz traces the complex path, “occurring in fits and starts in both the Subcontinent's north and south over several hundred years” (63), toward becoming a literary language in the nineteenth century. Still, as he notes, Persian poetry retained an important place within literary culture and argues it should be considered as having “refashioned” itself when confronted by social and linguistic change, rather than being overwhelmed. Reference to the past masters of Persian literature was one way in which this refashioning was articulated.

The second chapter focuses on the development of the literary return movement in Isfahan during the eighteenth century. Schwartz argues that these developmental stages demonstrate how the urge to refer to the earlier epochs of Persian poetry were driven both by social and political change as well as the links between poets that formed a distinct community. It is an overdue historicization of the movement's roots, digging into the effect of patronage and politics and providing evidence for the poets’ views directly from their poems. Schwartz provides a visual network map to show how poets interacted with or related to each other. I found these illustrative aids a provocative means for exploring avenues of research, although one regrets that they were not printed in color and given a larger space, particularly as they grow more complex.

Chapter 3 studies the war-ballads of Afghanistan based on Ferdawsī's Shāhnāmeh, as mentioned. Schwartz's approach to these texts differs significantly from that in chapters 2 and 4 because it is the genre itself that manifests the idea of literary return:

He also acknowledges that imitations of the Shāhnāmeh are found throughout South Asia as well as Afghanistan and Iran. The strongest connection to the other two cases is how poets in the nineteenth century referred to one of the foundational works of Persian poetry to comment on contemporary events. The example goes a long way toward refuting the claim of later historians that literary return only produced pale imitations of the masters with no connection to the author's social environment. It could be argued however, that Schwartz himself is drawing geographical borders around a literary phenomenon, that is, Shāhnāmeh-like poems, that transcended them. He does anticipate this criticism to a certain extent by discussing British involvement in the production of these texts, but it does leave the reader to wonder why this section of the book required a geographical designation at all.

The fourth chapter discusses literary return at the court of the last Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ghaws Khān Bahadur. It offers a fascinating look at a community of poets debating the relevance of classical Persian poetry while the Persian language itself was disappearing from “cosmopolitan” use. The existence of this literary activity complicates, if not contradicts, the narrative of Persian poetry's decline in South Asia. He describes literary debates about the relationship between classical poetry and later styles that echoed the concerns of poets in Iran and elsewhere. He supports his argument again with a set of complex network maps, which can be difficult to decipher although they do give a good impression of these intricate sets of relationships. The chapter provides an interesting perspective not just on the debate about literary return but on the development of Persian poetry as poets coped with a shifting political, social, and literary landscape.

Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 is the first serious attempt to pick apart one of the foundational assumptions of Persian literary historiography and achieves its goal admirably. Schwartz adds a great deal to our understanding of the historical facts surrounding this era and demonstrates that the relationship between poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their predecessors was born of social conditions and used by those later authors to understand and reflect on their times. He takes this idea into the Persianate world, uncovering communities of poets grappling with the same issues. Even when the application is a little uneven, it is still an intriguing and useful tool for provoking further scholarship. Finally, the book is notable for transcending the criticism of scholars who dismiss the poetry of this era on qualitative terms and claim that the best that can be said is that some poets produced worthy imitations of their betters. Poetry is born of people communicating their ideas about the world around them, where they have come from, and where they are going, and Schwartz's work asks us to listen more closely to these conversations.