Digital Object Identifier
Resistance does not always come with guns and massacres. It often lies hidden in letters of love and pages of books. Marjan Kamali’s The Stationery Shop of Tehran (2019) presents a fascinating love story that is set against the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, one of the most consequential political crises in modern Middle Eastern history. This research paper analyses how the novel depicts print culture through books, letters, and classical Persian poetry and how it presents intellectual resistance against the state-sponsored propaganda. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, and media-theoretical frameworks developed by Jacques Ellul and Noam Chomsky, this research paper interprets the stationery shop as a microcosm of civic dialogue. The paper further employs memory theory from Marianne Hirsch and Svetlana Boym to argue that personal letters and diaspora narratives resist historical erasure.
Anindita Janhabee Swaro. “Love, Letters, and Propaganda: Print Culture and Intellectual Resistance in The Stationery Shop of Tehran.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 963–983. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.61.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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