Literary Antecedents of the Absurd

Literary Antecedents of the Absurd

Azizmohammadi, Fatemeh
Mashhadi, Jillah

As is well-known the concept of the Absurd is an off-shoot of Existentialism which was born in the 19th century and reached almost global acceptability in the early 20th century thanks to the works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and the Absurd playwrights like Beckett and Pinter. This paper tries to show that the Absurd had literary manifestations in earlier literatures also. This does not aim to be an exhaustive survey of ―the tradition of the Absurd‖ as in Martin Esslin‘s The Theatre of the Absurd. A unique feature of this paper is the linkage which it establishes between the Absurd and the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

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