A Critical Investigation of Traditional Treatment of Literary Schools and Movements in Kurdish Literature

The present paper seeks to address and examine the literary movements, trends, and schools in Kurdish literature, and to account for their true representations in Kurdish literary works. According to contemporary Kurdish literary historians, Kurdish literature before the era of the Renewal is referred to as the classical literature; Romanticism appeared simultaneously with the Renewal, and realism was manifested afterwards. Is it appropriate to refer to these trends and periods in the Kurdish context as classicism, romanticism, and realism? The present research argues that these terms applied to Kurdish literature were introduced into Kurdish letters and culture as the immediate result of the influence of European letters and trends. The central argument of this study is that Kurdish literary movements and the historical epochs assigned to them by the scholars are not the same as what is observed in the history of French and English literature. This study considers the whole body of Kurdish written literature into three distinct periods and sections that are the ancient literature, also called ‘the literature of Diwan’, from the beginning to the early twentieth century, ‘the literature of the renewal period’, from the 1900s to the mid twentieth century, and ‘the modern and contemporary literature’, from the 1960s to the present.