Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century.It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq.It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead.Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. Dust That Never Settles considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present.It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives.In writing the first comparative study of the literary output of