The emergence of Persian literature as the national literature of Iran, like that of national literatures elsewhere, has been marked ‘by the assertion of the national literary language as superior to its cosmopolitan antecedents, better suited to contemporary circumstances, or more accessible to a larger public’. Large quantities of information – ill-fitting within an account of Persian literary history and retro-fitted for the purposes of the Iranian nation – remain obstructed, obscured and elided. The idea of ‘literary return’ has been the most effective tool in achieving such ends.

The idea of ‘literary return’ – that some poets in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Iran revived Persian poetry by returning to the styles of the classical masters, while poets outside of Iran did not – has left much historiographical debris in its wake: the conflation of the writing of Persian literary history with that of Iran's own; the assertion of a greater proprietary right by Iran over the classical ‘masters’; and the erasure from history of many facets of Persian literary culture occurring outside of Iran's borders. Most crucially, the idea of ‘literary return’ has served as an interjection in Persian literary history seeking to revitalise literature in Iran on a national basis while effectively dismissing aspects of Persian literary history occurring elsewhere. Recognising the historiographical problem of ‘literary return’ in writing about Persian literature and addressing what can be done to rectify it has been the major aim of this book.

The preceding chapters have sought to challenge this conceptualisation of ‘literary return’ by re-depicting Persian literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through an emphasis on different literary communities in operation across a fracturing Persianate world. The poetic assemblies of the Safavid–Qajar interregnum in Isfahan, the Book of Kings-inspired war ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War and the literary activity of a court in South India all represent episodes of historically contingent literary communities engaged with the classical canon of the masters in order to better understand and depict their place within the shifting landscape of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persianate world. Rather than being a time defined by the grandiose revival of poetry in Iran and its stagnation elsewhere in Central and South Asia, the literary climate of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persianate world remains ripe for the comparison and exploration of shared and divergent literary practices and orientations on a multi-regional basis.