Introduction : burying the past : Iranian modernity's marriage to realism -- Dismembering and re-membering the beloved : how the Civil Code remade marriage and marriage remade love -- Wedding or funeral? : the Family Protection Act and the bride's consent -- Ain't I a woman? : domesticity's other -- Exhuming the beloved, revising the past : lawlessness and postmodernism -- A metaphor for civil society? : marriage and "rights talk" in the Khtami period -- Conclusion : a severed head? : Iranian literary modernity in transnational context.