The Republic of Imagination
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran comes a powerful and passionate case for the vital role of fiction today.
Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating follow-up, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society.
Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her at a reading, she energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favourite novels, she invites us to join her as citizens of her 'Republic of Imagination', a country where the villains are conformity, and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mixing memoir with literary criticism and social critique, Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) contends that imaginative literature is essential to good citizenship. Having once advanced this thesis regarding her native Iran, she extends it now to her adopted United States. For Nafisi, America's great works of literature make up a canon of supplementary founding documents, offering a purer articulation of the American dream than pols and pundits. In such books may be found the "Republic of Imagination," in which heroic characters exemplify humanistic ideals. According to Nafisi, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn epitomizes America's "national myth" that of a vagrant underdog declaring his independence from a corrupt society and decamping with his moral courage to the wilderness. Similarly exemplary are "Huck Finn's Progenies": Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and John Singer in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Explaining how she came to appreciate the civic value of these books, Nafisi suggests that, as a refugee from a repressive regime, she can claim a privileged perspective on American ideals. Her social critique is scarcely original: most readers have heard that the downside of American freedom is American greed, that politicians are demagogues, and that American media is polarized. Through accessible and informative readings, however, Nafisi succeeds in conveying her broader point that Great American Novels can teach us to be good "citizen readers."
