Persian Pictures (Anthem Travel Classics)
Contributors: Liora Lukitz (Introduction)
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: July 2005
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9781843311690
Subjects: Classic travel writing; c 1800 to c 1900; Middle East - General; History - General History; Travel; Iran; Asia - Southwest; History / Middle East
Description: This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, "Persian Pictures" is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic complex, mythical past and present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly "secret, mysterious life of the East;" the lives of its women; its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram--the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed--and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. "Persian Pictures" is both travelog and meditation, an elegaic and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.--From publisher description.