SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the aestheticization of violence in the vernacular literatures of the Caucasus from the nineteenth century to the Soviet period through the framework of transgressive sanctity. It then lays the groundwork for the tours through literature, culture, and history that follow by surveying the precolonial vernacular and cosmopolitan literatures that informed anticolonial poetics during the tsarist and Soviet periods. Given its pivotal role in shaping Chechen literature, it begins with Daghestan. It considers how this region has functioned as a nodal point within the precolonial Caucasus, not least through its early and extensive contacts with the wider Islamic world. After viewing Daghestan as a crossroads of multiple civilizations, it examines how Chechen and Georgian literatures enrich the framework within which Daghestani literature circulated. It concludes by looking at how the literary anthropology of transgressive sanctity enriches the study of both literature and anthropology through its politics of literary form.