تكوين تدريجي سنت نگارش تاريخ ادبي ايران

The Gradual Development of the Tradition of Writing Literary Histories

It is not that easy to classify works which belong to the genre of literary histories as there is the distance of more than a thousand years between those texts which only have the features of a literary history and the texts proper of literary histories. Moreover, the sheer number, approaches and methods used in such texts are varied. Contrary to common belief the origins of contemporary literary history are not to be found in biographies rather in pre-biographies. In this paper the origins of the tradition and its development up to the contemporary time are discussed. Texts have been classified as pre-biographies, biographies and literary histories. It is argued that the relationship of the three categories is as grandfather to father to son.