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An event-driven distribution model for automatic insertion of illustrations in narrative discourse : a study based on the Shāhnāma narrativeMahdavi, M. Amin January 2005 (has links)
Book designers and manuscript artists have inserted illustrations into narrative works for centuries now. This practice is an intelligent behaviour that requires specialised knowledge of the text and the external parameters affecting the selection and placement criteria. This thesis offers a model for automation of illustration insertion into a narrative discourse. The model presented here is a significant improvement to the crudest method of dividing the text into equal parts and inserting one illustration into each part. This study starts from the position that narratives are expressions of mental representations of a sequence of events in various modes of discourse. Here, this mental representation is referred to as ‘the story’. When coupled with a mode of discourse, the story becomes a narrative. Thus, a story can be expressed as oral, written, pictorial, or film narratives. If they all express the same sequence of events, they are telling the same story. In an illustrated narrative, while the written discourse expresses the event sequence in the form of sentences, illustrations depict them using pictorial elements. The insertion of illustration into written narrative is analogous to collating two texts into one, based on their event content. In this process, sentential representation of events are collated against the pictorial expressions of the same events. Thus, for the purposes of automation, this study claims that an investigation into the locations of events can lead to potential locations for illustration insertions. However, the list of potential illustration locations can be improved further through eliminating the events that are not depictable. This model is also able to further improve on the insertion policy by incorporating event constraints as parameters for event priorities. If a set of event types is given preference in the illustration policy, the model is able to prioritise the list accordingly. Furthermore, the model is able to allow the samedegree of customisation for preferred characters, locations, or time in the story. The prioritisation can be applied to the entire narrative, or smaller chunks of the narrative text such as chapters or sections. The model is developed via the study of the verb roots of sentences – denoting the event types – in the discourse of Mohl’s critical edition of the Shāhnāma, the Persian epic composed by Abu al Qāsium Firdausī in 400/1010. A collection of 109 illustrated manuscripts of the Shāhnāma was considered in this study. These manuscripts come from various traditions of Persian paintings and cover a long period from the early 14th century to the late 19th century. A population of nearly 6,000 Shāhnāma illustrations were annotated. Each illustration is linked to a sentence in the narrative. The bottom-up approach to the study of verb distribution in the written discourse against the illustration location distribution indicates that illustration distribution follows the same trend as that of the depictable event distribution in the discourse. Particular event tokens displayed a high rate of illustration rendering them as all time favourite events. In summary, this study claims that investigation into the distribution of events in a narrative discourse provides a model for the insertion of illustrations into a narrative work.
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Illustrated manuscripts and lithographic books in dialogue: Firdawsi's Shahnama in nineteenth-century IranCho, Hyunjin 01 December 2023 (has links)
This dissertation conducts the first systematic study of illustrated Shahnama manuscripts from Qajar Iran (1789-1925). The Shahnama is a Persian epic, composed by the poet Firdawsi (940-1020 or 1025) in the eleventh century. Over time, the Shahnama became the most frequently illustrated Persian text and manuscript copies of the epic continued to be made in nineteenth-century Iran. However, rather than studying the continued production of illustrated manuscripts, scholarship on Qajar Iran has thus far privileged monumental oil paintings, photography, and lithography.
I propose that in nineteenth-century Iran, illustrated Shahnama manuscripts were a potent tool for the ruling class and other ambitious individuals to express and build their identity, lineage, and power, despite the availability of other—and more public—ways to communicate the same message. A vibrant network of manuscript painters, who also worked in other media, produced these illustrated Shahnama copies in dialogue with novel forms of cultural production. Specifically, I argue that illustrated manuscripts and lithographed editions of the epic were created by overlapping circles of artists and they demonstrate how Iran and India were part of a shared cultural zone. By explaining how these two media existed in a dialogical relationship, affecting one another, this project challenges the narrative of teleological progression from one medium to the next.
I center my discussion around eleven illustrated Shahnama examples and examine the manuscripts both as individual units and as interrelated parts of a group. I focus on their contexts of production, including patronage, intended audience, and artist workshop and pedagogical relationships. In Chapter 1, I study two early-nineteenth-century illustrated manuscripts (Or. 4906 in the British Library and Lewis O.58 in the Free Library) and explain how each underscored the Qajars’ royal identity and dynastic legitimacy during a period of intense competition for the throne and territorial instability. Chapter 2 explains that military leaders and elite administrators were key drivers of illustrated Shahnama manuscript production. I anchor my discussion around MS 535 in the Matenadaran Library in Armenia to outline how non-royally-commissioned manuscripts mirror the patrons’ political aspirations.
Chapter 2 also traces the shared motifs that link one manuscript to another and shows that Shiraz was a major production center for illustrated Shahnama manuscripts. The visual repetitions and adaptations I identify in these manuscripts show that the period’s landscape of artistic production was a tightly woven network of artists’ pedagogical and working relationships. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Shahnama books from the latter half of the nineteenth century, including lithographed editions printed in Bombay and illustrated manuscripts made in Iran. Images in these books display the flexibility of the artists as they began to work on both manuscripts and lithographed books; developed unique compositions rooted in the cultural and economic ties connecting Shiraz and Bombay; and expressed artistic agency and authorship as they produced for a speculative market. The four chapters together offer a fresh perspective on the Qajar dynasty’s imperial and ideological usages of the epic, the period’s active non-royal patronage and vibrant workshop practices, and Qajar society’s cultural connections to India, all of which distinctively contributed to building a visual language unique to nineteenth-century Iran.
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Timurid manuscript production : the scholarship and aesthetics of Prince Bāysunghur’s Royal Atelier (1420-1435)Mihan, Shiva January 2018 (has links)
Considered one of the pinnacles of the arts of the book in the entire history of Persian art, the life of the Timurid prince, Bāysunghur (1397-1433) and his royal library-atelier have been studied for more than a century. Yet previous scholarship, although solid on it own terms, has not combined study of the entirety of production with sustained analysis of individual productions of Bāysunghur’s atelier. Prior to this study, a number of manuscripts were completely neglected, and several others were studied only briefly. What is more, the single extant document describing procedures and progress in the atelier, although well known, demanded further clarification on various levels. This dissertation discusses in six chapters the operation and productions of the library with particular attention paid to its highlight, Bāysunghur’s famous Shāhnāma. After an introduction to the field and an overview of previous studies, I turn to the report of the head of the atelier, clarifying some technical terms and establishing the date of the report. Secondly, the corpus of Bāysunghurī productions is examined chronologically and in relation to the librarian’s report, with individual manuscripts analysed with regard to their textual and aesthetic traits and their placement in an art historical context. Next, the Shāhnāma of Bāysunghur, which for many years has been inaccessible for close scholarly study, receives extended treatment. The final chapter presents a discussion of the textual and aesthetic content of the corpus and reconsiders the role of the atelier supervisor. The overall aim is to enhance and extend understanding of the arts of the book in a unique royal library, that of Prince Bāysunghur.
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The Medieval Reception of Firdausī's Shāhnāma: The Ardashīr Cycle as a Mirror for PrincesAskari, Nasrin 02 August 2013 (has links)
Based on a broad survey of the reception of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma in medieval times, this dissertation argues that Firdausī’s oeuvre was primarily perceived as a book of wisdom and advice for kings and courtly élites. The medieval reception of the Shāhnāma is clearly manifested in the comments of medieval authors about Firdausī and his work, and in their use of the Shāhnāma in the composition of their own works. The production of ikhtiyārāt-i Shāhnāmas (selections from the Shāhnāma) in medieval times and the remarkable attention of the authors of mirrors for princes to Firdausī’s opus are particularly illuminating in this regard.
The survey is complemented by a close textual reading of the Ardashīr cycle in the Shāhnāma in comparison with other medieval historical accounts about Ardashīr, in order to illustrate how history in the Shāhnāma is reduced to only a framework for the presentation of ideas and ideals of kingship. Based on ancient Persian beliefs regarding the ideal state of the world, I argue that Ardashīr in the Shāhnāma is represented as a Saviour of the world. Within this context, I offer new interpretations of the symbolic tale of Ardashīr’s fight against a giant worm, and explain why the idea of the union of kingship and religion, a major topic in almost all medieval Persian mirrors for princes, has often been attributed to Ardashīr. Finally, I compare the Ardashīr cycle in the Shāhnāma with nine medieval Persian mirrors for princes to demonstrate that the ethico-political concepts contained in them, as well as the portrayal of Ardashīr, remain more or less the same in all these works.
Study of the Shāhnāma as a mirror for princes, as this study shows, not only reveals the meaning of its symbolic tales, but also sheds light on the pre-Islamic roots of some of the ethico-political concepts presented in the medieval Perso-Islamic literature of wisdom and advice for kings and courtiers.
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The Medieval Reception of Firdausī's Shāhnāma: The Ardashīr Cycle as a Mirror for PrincesAskari, Nasrin 02 August 2013 (has links)
Based on a broad survey of the reception of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma in medieval times, this dissertation argues that Firdausī’s oeuvre was primarily perceived as a book of wisdom and advice for kings and courtly élites. The medieval reception of the Shāhnāma is clearly manifested in the comments of medieval authors about Firdausī and his work, and in their use of the Shāhnāma in the composition of their own works. The production of ikhtiyārāt-i Shāhnāmas (selections from the Shāhnāma) in medieval times and the remarkable attention of the authors of mirrors for princes to Firdausī’s opus are particularly illuminating in this regard.
The survey is complemented by a close textual reading of the Ardashīr cycle in the Shāhnāma in comparison with other medieval historical accounts about Ardashīr, in order to illustrate how history in the Shāhnāma is reduced to only a framework for the presentation of ideas and ideals of kingship. Based on ancient Persian beliefs regarding the ideal state of the world, I argue that Ardashīr in the Shāhnāma is represented as a Saviour of the world. Within this context, I offer new interpretations of the symbolic tale of Ardashīr’s fight against a giant worm, and explain why the idea of the union of kingship and religion, a major topic in almost all medieval Persian mirrors for princes, has often been attributed to Ardashīr. Finally, I compare the Ardashīr cycle in the Shāhnāma with nine medieval Persian mirrors for princes to demonstrate that the ethico-political concepts contained in them, as well as the portrayal of Ardashīr, remain more or less the same in all these works.
Study of the Shāhnāma as a mirror for princes, as this study shows, not only reveals the meaning of its symbolic tales, but also sheds light on the pre-Islamic roots of some of the ethico-political concepts presented in the medieval Perso-Islamic literature of wisdom and advice for kings and courtiers.
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