What CHOICE says: Important in postmodern literary criticism is the rejection of totalizing or universalizing narratives in the criticism of literary works. Using the ideas of "literariness" as developed by Roman Jacobson and the Russian formalists, and of "dialogism" and "polyphony" from Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, Khorrami seeks the tools and concepts for the criticism of modern (i.e., 20-21st-century) Persian fiction within the Persian literary tradition itself. Thus, he rejects the work of Western and Westernized critics and many attributions of Western influence as "neo-Orientalist discourse," which he views as generally reductionist. Avoiding the formalists' notion of literary criticism as a scientific discipline through the use of universal categories, the author develops his flexible theory in a cogent manner. He devotes the first part of the book to working out the theory and the remainder to applying his theory to a prominent novel and some short stories. He chooses his examples carefully, and his theory is accommodating enough to illuminate various fictional structures.

This is a thoughtful book and an interesting contribution to postmodernist criticism of Persian fiction. Summing Up: Recommended. Persian and comparative literature collections serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty.