Bibliography 2: #BIB35794

Key	BIB35794
Reference type	Thesis
Title	Transnational Historical Fiction in a Postsecular Age : A Study of the Spiritual Theses in the Works of Luis Alberto Urrea and Bahiyyih Nakhjavani
Author	Sobhani, Mary
Year	2014
Date	August 2014
Place published	Fayetteville, AR
Abstract	This study, employing a postsecular theoretical prism, will analyze the spiritual theses given expression through the historical fiction of Mexican-American, or Chicano, author Luis Alberto Urrea and exiled Persian Bahá’í author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. My purpose is to demonstrate how the postsecular theory is a favorable mode of criticism for works of contemporary, spiritually-charged transnational historical fiction. I choose to use the historical fiction of these two authors because of the distinct religious traditions from which their stories emerge. Both Urrea and Nakhjavani weave their historical tales so as to underscore spiritual aspects of human reality. Spirituality is a loaded word. Often conflated with religion in general, spirituality in this study refers to all matters pertaining to the qualities of the soul and the practices of belief, including prayer, faith, altruism and world-views which privilege these aspects over purely material or worldly ones. I will compare how these authors approach spirituality in their novels and problematize traditional ideas of the religious and the secular. I find the similarities in the authors' powerful representation of spiritual aspects of reality particularly striking precisely because of the patent differences between the two authors and their styles: Urrea, a male Chicano writer, a Christian of bicultural heritage and poor economic background, writes fiction in the U.S. Latino tradition; Nakhjavani, on the other hand, is a female Persian writer of self-proclaimed postmodern leanings, a Bahá’í, raised in Uganda, and educated in Great Britain and the United States. Yet both authors' historical narratives express world-views in which the spiritual has particular importance, not as a supersession of quotidian reality but in an integral partnership with it, the baseline upon which postsecular thought is built. This study concludes that such an expression of world-views signals towards the change in socio-political philosophy which philosopher and scholar Jürgen Habermas iterates in “Faith and Knowledge,” his acceptance address for the 2001 Peace Prize awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. As per Habermas, a significant change is occurring in twenty-first century Western society; this change, I argue, is evident in the spiritually charged transnational historical fiction of Urrea and Nakhjavani.
Notes	Bahá'í Faith: pp. 3, 25, 28-60, 122-123, 129, 136.
Language	English
Keywords	NAKHJAVANI, BAHIYYIH. THE WOMAN WHO READ TOO MUCH; URREA, LUIS ALBERTO. HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER; FICTION, HISTORICAL; LITERATURE; SPIRITUALITY
Number of pages	[9], 140
Academic department	Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
University	University of Arkansas
Degree	Ph.D.
Advisor	Bell, Steven
File attachments	internal-pdf://2967279742/Sobhani - Transnational Historical Fiction.pdf

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