The intellectual best-sellers of post-revolutionary Iran: on backwardness, Elite-killing, and Western rationality
The intellectual best-sellers of post-revolutionary Iran: on backwardness, Elite-killing, and Western rationality
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后革命伊朗的知识畅销书：论落后、精英屠杀和西方理性
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发表时间：
2004
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通讯作者：
A. Matin
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作者：
A. Matin
During the 1990s, post-revolutionary Iran experienced a relative “thaw” in the censorship of the daily newspapers, periodicals, and books. Emerging from the repression of the Islamic Republic’s first decade, yet still restricted in access to film, television, and music, a growing literate public picked up books to learn about the past, reflect on its present, or simply escape boredom. An interesting question is who the members of this new Iranian reading audience are and what they are interested in. No comprehensive studies are available, but according to at least one survey, a majority of the book-reading public was young, educated, and middle class, mostly from central Iranian cities. The leading groups were university and high school graduates and students, followed by housewives and government employees. Among the educated, those least interested in books were seminarians and physicians.2 During 2000-01, Iran published 30,003 (non-school text) book titles, in 159,439,838 volumes. The average print-run was about 5,000 per volume; and 82% of all titles were published in Tehran. The highest print-run category was children’s books, followed by religion and languages, with history and geography together falling in the lowest rank (with a print-run average of slightly above 3,000).3 The following study will focus on Iran’s “intellectual best sellers,” an intriguing feature of the 1990s cultural landscape.4 These will be defined as books written for the educated public in fields broadly conceived of as the humanities. For the purposes of this study, such books will be classified in three major groups. First, “successful” or well-received books are those reprinted within a year of their first appearance. Second, “best-sellers” are books that go through several printings within a few years. Third,
