Reading "Lolita" in Tehran: A Story of Love, Books and Revolution

Format:	Hardback 350 pages

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Synopsis

When Azar Nafisi was fired from Tehran University (where she was teaching English literature) because she refused to wear a veil, she gathered a group of her female students and resumed her classes at home, privately and discreetly. There, a group of young women discussed, argued about and communed with Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Henry James, Nabokov and others in the canon of English writers. The surreal picture of reading "Lolita", weighing the sexuality of Jane Austen or the American authenticity of Gatsby in the severe aftermath of Iran's Islamic Revolution was not lost on either Nafisi or her students. nThe young women themselves represented a range of types and as we meet each of these students we enter their lives, investigate their backgrounds and receive an interesting insight into life in contemporary Iran.

Book details

Published
30/06/2003

Publisher
I B Tauris & Co Ltd

ISBN
9781860649813

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Jacket review

"I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom - as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher." - Susan Sontag "This important book is an eloquent testimony to the ability of human beings faced with tyranny to find freedom inside their own heads". -The Times "an incisive look at recent history...inspiring and required reading." -The Guardian "This book is a remarkably original account of one woman's first-hand experience of the Iranian revolution, generously interspersed with erudite passages of literary criticism". -Parviz Radji, The Times Higher Education Supplement