Ankur Desval Fehrani

The legends about Alexander the Great known as Alexander Romance or Βίος ᾽Αλεξάνδρου του Μακεδόνος (lit. ‘Life of Alexander of Macedon’) of Pseudo-Callisthenes originated in the post-Hellenistic Alexandria and spread around all the known world in the Middle Ages. In the Persophone world, these popular legends were transformed into literary epics, which kept on appearing for centuries on end. I am trying to decode this literary tradition by asking three important questions. First, what makes up a Persian poetical Eskandar-Nama, its metre, as well as its formal and narrative constraints. Second, why does Eskandar-Nama genre remain popular for centuries on end, where I also reconsider the long-held disregard for the role that the patrons would have played in the composition of these epics. Finally, I look at how a successor poet achieves his own place within the tradition, that is, achieving that fine and difficult balance between tradition and innovation. To this end, I am looking at five Eskandar-Nama epics that appeared after Firdausi and Nizami. These are by: Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, Maulana Jami, Navidi Shirazi, San’ai Mashhadi and Badri Kashmiri.