000 01492cam a2200241 4500500
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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aSararu, Camelia
_eauthor
245 0 0 _a“Endless mud” or “city of wonders”? Discordant representations of Isfahan by European travelers
260 _c2018.
500 _a27
520 _aThis article examines the polarization of European representations of the Persian capital in the seventeenth century, focusing on certain discursive and metadiscursive devices mobilized by travel writing. While claiming to take a purely referential approach, most of these descriptions are in keeping with a long rhetorical tradition of the urban eulogy, often resorting to the idealizing topoi of the paradisiac city or of the locus amœnus. Some particularly disenchanted depictions, like that of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, are thus to be understood as challenging this intertextuality and as an attempt to deconstruct the sublimated image of Isfahan in the name of experience and faithfulness to reality.
690 _atravel literature
690 _aPietro della Valle
690 _adescription of Isfahan
690 _aurban eulogy
690 _aJean-Baptiste Tavernier
690 _arepresentation
690 _alocus amœnus
786 0 _nDix-septième siècle | o 278 | 1 | 2018-03-05 | p. 63-72 | 0012-4273
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-dix-septieme-siecle-2018-1-page-63?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c469731
_d469731