Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran

(Stanford University Press) This book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of “the real” in modern Iran. By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. Motlagh is an assistant professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo.