The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historiographical overview of some of the major shifts and developments in Persian literary culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia. It highlights the formation and consolidation of the ‘literary return’ narrative in Iran, trends and debates in Afghan literary historiography and the narrative of ‘decline’ of Persian in post-Mughal South Asia. Exploring side by side the general matrices of Persian literary culture in these three locales elucidates the far-reaching impact of the idea of ‘literary return’ upon national, regional and global renderings of Persian literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the narrative of ‘literary return’ remains the overarching frame for truncating the historiography of the Persianate world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not the only one. Abetting it are the separate historiographies of Persian literary culture in Afghanistan and South Asia that have followed their own more circumscribed paths. Charting the major ongoing debates in Persian literary history writing points to the various shortcomings of these frameworks and highlights the gaps into which the topics of the three subsequent chapters will be placed. Inessence, the three literary historiographies presented here serve as the roadmaps for navigating the corresponding individual chapters that follow.

‘Literary Return’ and the ‘Indian Style’

The idea of ‘literary return’ was given its name, and most prominently for-mulated, by the poet and literary historian Muhammad Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) in the early part of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1930s, Bahar began articulating some of the characteristics of ‘literary return’ and, alongside it, developed his criteria for evaluating ‘good’ poetry. But it was most notably in his groundbreaking work Stylistics or the History of Evolution of Persian Writing (Sabk-shinasi ya tarikh-i tatavvur-i nasr-i Farsi) that Bahar devised a schematic for understanding Persian literary history by dividing its evolution into four distinct categories, which included ‘literary return’.