Rereading Shaykh Lutfullah Mosque: Intertextuality in the Poetry and Architecture of Safavid Isfahan

Abstract

This dissertation considers the way in which the Isfahani style of poetry in the Safavid period (1501-1736) might open understandings of an architecture of that same period: Shaykh Lutfullah mosque (1602-1619) in Isfahan. This interdisciplinary engagement between poetry and architecture addresses a particular inadequacy in contemporary accounts of post-Islam Persian architecture, which are reductive of the elaborative nature of the phenomenon. Moreover, the dissertation suggests that in a geo-historically consistent context, not only does this interdisciplinary method elaborate the architecture but it also starts to speak of the culture more broadly. The dissertation aims to open current understandings of this architecture to a re-reading. It does so by engaging with poetry in order to prompt one to rethink, elaborate and produce tangential encounters that can guide analysis and generate nuanced understandings of the inter-text of architecture. Hence it represents a ‘move’ from conventional theories of poetry and architecture toward a new condition in which poetry helps to deconstruct architecture for novel and complex understandings. This is achieved across the dissertation with the aid of post-structural discourses that are critical of the univocality of conventional thinking and which facilitate the study of the relationship between different forms of art that are geo-historically consistent.