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Sociological criticism is one of the modern and efficient methods of the study of literary texts, and today it has a wide application in the analysis of modern literary geners, especially the contemporary Persian novel.                                 This article aims at the analysis and appreciation of the contemporary Persian novel and explores the historical, political, and sociological structure of the Iranian society reflected in some of these novels. The findings of this research show that:

1.Novel is the most complete genre that might respond positively to   modern sociological studies

2.The Persian novel can explain the structures of the Iranian society very well.

3.The more distance we take from the simple structure of the Iranian society in the constitutional age (i.e. , early nineteenth century), the age of the emergence of the first Persian novels, and move towards the more complicated and intricate contemporary society ,the structure of the Persian  novel becomes more complicated and the social themes become more varied and more complex.

4.The themes and subjects treated by the writers of the Persian novels shift from broad generalizations to specific details. This point, on one hand, shows the individualization of the Iranian contemporary man, who has a proper in the modern novel ,and the change of the structures of the society from the ancient simple ,primitive and heroic state to complicated and modern structures  on the other.

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This article presents a new aspect of the poems of Soltan Valad, Jalaleddin Mohammad Moulawi's senior son.  In his poetry, one may spot a new prosodic feature which is drastically different from all classical Persian poems. This difference is so significant that one can hardly attribute it to such typical errors made by scribes, typists or publishers. After highlighting this feature, the author presents two possible factors underlying this difference: The contrasts in the phonological system of the Persian words due to proximity with the Greek and Turkish languages in Qunieh, and the impact of the music dominating the House of Dervishes and the style of the story tellers and writers of that age.

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Having published his first novel, Ali Mohammad Afghani (born in 1925, Kermanshah) reached the top of his literary career. Considering the dearth of creative literary activities in the years following the coup of 18^th August 1953 and other social, literary and historical reasons discussed in the paper, the novel (written in 1961) was remarkably acclaimed by the readers.Following this acclamation, literary critics also appreciated the author as the greatest contemporary novelist and his work as the greatest novel of the century. Although Afghani wrote several other novels, because of certain reasons discussedin the article he could never regain the acceptance of the readers.Now after half a century of the publication of the novel and its becoming one of the classics in the history of contemporary novel-writing in Iran, we have a new study of the role Ali Mohammad Afghani and his outstanding book in the formation and development of Persian novel.Moreover, we try to show how he has been affected by earlier narrative literature and his impact on subsequent novels.In order to clarify the reasons behind the books popularity with the readers and its position among Persian novels, the sociological and literary dimensions of the work are discussed in this article.

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In this article the Ontological Metaphors in the Songs of Southern Khorasan are studied in two parts: human as the central domain and non-human as the central domain. The importance of this article is that most researches done on songs are anthropological researches to introduce the national and local culture and they mainly focus on the musical aspects of these songs. No research so far has been done on the linguistic aspector the aspect considered in this research on these songs. The necessity of this research is due to the fact that with the change of generations and improvement in technologythe songs will no longer be remembered and this part of folklore will fade away sooner or later. Therefore, it is necessary to record and introduce this oral culture to people. The dataused in this article are collected from books about the culture of Southern Khorasan and also from interviewing the people of this region. With a view atLakaff and Johnsen’s theory about metaphor,that is, metaphor is not a linguistic issue but a mental one, this study aims to show how these mental conceptualizations in the songs can be a reflection of the people’s experiences.

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Psychological criticism has been founded on the theories of psychologists such as Freud and Jung though it is not restricted to these theories. What is important in this approach is the critic's understanding of these theories in order to apply them to reading the text and offer a new interpretation accordingly. "Esmaeil-e-Shoja" (“Brave Esmaeil”) is title of a short story by Houshang Moradi Kermani. The subject of the fiction is one of the subjects discussed in psychology: phobia or intense fear in childhood. In this article the researcher attempts to read the fiction in the light of current psychological theories. In this regard, first phobia is discussed and its symptoms have been mentioned. Then, its types, causes and treatments have been analyzed and all these items have been studied in the fiction. It is concluded that this fiction is helpful in curing children suffering from Phobia in the narrative therapy process

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Narratologists often make a distinction between classical and modern narratives and contend that classical fiction mainly focuses on characteristics such as the intention of the author, the single and fixed meaning of the narrative, and its closure. In contrast, in modern fiction certain other elements are emphasized like the centrality of the reader, lack of closure, plurality of meaning, and intertextuality. However, with a glance at some classical texts like Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh this distinction can be challenged. For example, Ferdowsi employs certain mythological and symbolic narratives in his epic which had no place in classical literature and at the same time he warns the reader not to restrict himself to the surface meaning of the story. Thus he lifts the addressee to narrative addressee and makes his stories open-ended and open to interpretation

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In this article, the aim of the authors is to study the role of repetition in creating music and parallelism in Nimayee poems in the three collections of poems by Mehdi Akhavan Sales: Zamestan, Akhere Shahname and Az Avesta. Accordingly, the researchers have investigated the various manners of repetition in creating parallelism in the poems at three levels: phonological parallelism, lexical parallelism and syntactic parallelism. The present article tries to show that the musical parallelism in Akhavan’s Nimayee poems rises from the phonological, lexical and syntactic repetition. The authors found that their phonological parallelism was based on consonant and vowel repetition in sentences and also linguistic expressions, variety of rhythms and the poet’s innovation in using some Nimayee rhythms. Moreover, the repetition of words in different manners and the use of rhyme and range have created the lexical parallelism in Akhavan’s poems. Finally, employing some figures of speech syntagmatically and paradigmatically have created the syntactic parallelism in this poems.

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Literary texts are the product of individual unconscious psyche and collective consciousness. In Iranian mythology, Fereydoun and Zahhak are symbols of good and evil. This research is an attempt to demonstrate aspects of growth and decay according to Erich Fromm’s theories. It aims at finding aspects of growth (love of life, love of humanity, freedom from the archetypal Mother) and contrasting them with the manifestations of decay (love of death, narcissism, return to mother’s womb) in respectively the characters of Fereydoun and Zahhak in Shahnameh.

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Khaqani is one of the most important poets in Persian literature. His artistic personality is a complex character; he has worked on various branches of art and elegy is one of the main of these branches. Khaqani has composed over sixty elegies that are considered his masterpieces. His personal elegies are the most famous and the most artistically composed Persian elegies. Seven of these elegies he wrote on the death of his son, Rashid al-Din, which show his extreme sorrow and grief. The colours have a particular psychological impact on the images of these elegies. Khaqani with three colours (red, black and yellow) has created themes and poetic images in these elegies. These three colors are not present in these elegies randomly or accidentally, but according to the new psychology his choices stem from his unconscious. The present research studies the influence of colours and their psychological function in Khaqani's personal elegies on the death of his son, Rashid al-Din.

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With the development of Bakhtin's theory of polyphony in literary criticism, the kind of attitude to literary texts has changed, and according to the needs of modern society, this discourse became the focus of attention of thinkers and literary theorists. Polyphony, with its own meta-lingual potentials, brings with it a new approach, a rethinking of the audience, so that the reader can have a new range of experiences. In this research, employing Bakhtinian dialogical logic, it is possible to examine Sange Saboor as polyphonic and dialogical. Sange Saboor has a special structure that differs from other works of Chubak and utilizes components such as the plurality of voices, the use of stream of consciousness, internal  monologue, intertextuality,  two-way discourse, literary schools, etc. The author of this article attempts to find the features that turn the text polyphonic and explore their function. 
 

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Shahnameh of Ferdowsi has been continuously studied by numerous researchers and scholars from literary, mythological and cultural aspects. One of the rarely and less noticed issues in this regard is investigating the ideological role and function of language in this piece of literature based on a certain adopted theory and method. In other words, the writers of this article try to understand how Ferdowsi utilizes language to engender the ideology of Iranian superiority and revive Iranian identity by producing the relevant discourse. To achieve this goal, the current study has been constructed over the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis introduced by the famous linguist Teun van Dijk. We also focus on the battle of Rostam and Chengesh in the story of “Rostam and Chinese Khaghan” (“Rostam and the king of China”) to restrict the research area. The results show that Ferdowsi employs some strategies such as ideological polarization, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, lexicalization, and actor description to make a discourse on the supremacy of the Iranians.

 

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Firdowsi's Shahnameh, the poetic mythological epic of Iran, is created on the base of opposite forces of the world, namely Iran and Aniran and the battles of their people, because the design of the mythological history of Iran is also basically created on the intercourse of opposites .One of the most comprehensive philosophical views on history is  Friedrich Hegel's attitude. In this view, the nature and purpose of history is the same as nature of the human, and the nature of the human is the attainment of consciousness and freedom. This freedom can only be realized gradually and dialectically; hence, in the Hegelian philosophy the war is a way to dialectical furtherance of history and the inception of the struggle between human beings, as gods and servants, has been introduced as the basis for achieving self-consciousness. The battle between human beings in Firdowsi's Shahnameh resembles the dialectical relation of "Gods and Servants" in Hegel's philosophy. In the mythological part of Shahnameh, the achievement of self-consciousness is only through the battle of the two sides of the opposition, as gods and servants in the battles between Jamshid and Zahak, Zahak and Kaveh (and then Fereydoun), the sons of Fereydoun, and the subsequent martyrdom of Iraj and his reprisal by Manuchehr. This essay, with an analytical-descriptive approach, will analyze the philosophy of the history of Firdowsi's Shahnameh, emphasizing  the relation between "gods and servants", and concludes that in this work all conflicts will achieve a resolution that can be identified as the moments of Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, the path to self-awareness and freedom, and this is the same as the possibility of reading  philosophy of mythical history of Iran in Firdowsi's Shahnameh based on Hegelian philosophy of history.
 

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The purpose of the present paper is to study the specific historical conditions in which a new relationship between “literary texts” and “public education” was established. This created a different formulation of “literature”. To that end, the genealogical method was used. From a genealogical point of view, phenomena have no meta-historical nature and are constructed following historical events and within complex power relations. The findings show that “poetry” and “education” in the mid-centuries discourse had a specific definition, function and formulation and that they established a relationship with each other in connection with the mechanism of the collector power and the construction of the hierarchy of society. The confrontation of Qajar rule and Iranian society with numerous crises such as war, cholera, and famine challenged the collector power. With the activation of new mechanisms of power (disciplinary and bio-power) and the formation of the assumption of equality, the hierarchical structure of the society was gradually weakened and the issue of public education as a way to save the state and the nation became problematic. The discourse of literary criticism turned the “Iranian people’s manners” and “literary texts” into issues and established a new relationship between the two. Meanwhile, a collection of texts and various social situations came under the umbrella of “literature”. In sum, the results indicate that the change of power mechanisms in the Qajar period marked a fundamental shift in the historical existence of Iranians and a new state of affairs was established; “Literature” and “education” bore new definitions, functions, and connections, and they established a new relationship with each other.
 

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The use of ambiguity and amphibology in speech, by arranging the setting for multiplicity of significations and delaying the process of meaning comprehension, leaves a significant impression on the creation of  artistic aspects of the literary work and to the extent that the speech is free of such expressive techniques, it turns into a single meaning proposition, and its artistic worth is diminished. In this paper, based on such a presupposition, we have revisited the poems of Hazin Lahiji (1103-1180 A.H.) and examined the multiplicity of significations in his poems at both lexical and textual levels. At the lexical level, some figures of speech such as amphibology and its types, coincidence, and derivative puns pass beyond the limits of significations of the couplet and open new horizons of meaning to the audience. This study confirms that 192 cases of amphibologies were used in his poem. At both the sentence and couplet levels we classified the types of ambiguities and multiplicity of significations and the causes of their emergence into three categories of linguistic, logical and tonal and in each category we investigated and analyzed the techniques used by the poet to create ambiguity and various significations.  
 

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Naser Khosrow’s intellectual system has been formed on the basis of his deep knowledge of religions, nations and ideologies, his faith inIsmailism, as well asthe cosmological and anthropological issues;and this coherent system of thought has had a decisive and visible effect on other aspects of his speech, including imagery.One of the important centers of artistic images in his works is the reflection on the dual spiritual and physical nature of man. Based on a descriptive-analytical method, this study seeks to search for the roots and sources of the artistic images of the body and soul in the works of Naser Khosrow as well as theircriticism and analysis.The origin of body and soul, the philosophy of the soul belonging to the body, the nature and destiny of body and soul and the different needs of these two are the most important reasons for creating numerous images of body and soul in Naser Khosrow’s works.Several other important clusters of images of body and soul are formed around concepts such as house and landlord, servant and master, ship and shipmaster, shirt, pearl and shell, mine and gem, prison and prisoner, and book and tree, showing body and soul relations from different perspectives.The results of the study show that the roots and sources of many images of body and soul in Nasser Khosrow’s works have been mentioned in previous theological and philosophical sources, including ancient Greek, Gnostic, Indian, Iranian, and Islamic works.
 

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Knowledge of grammar plays a significant role in understanding and interpreting texts. This article aims to explore the “genitive case” in Masnavi and analyze it from a historical syntax perspective to elucidate Rumi’s style and the distinctive usage of this construction in Masnavi compared to other works. The research method used is descriptive-analytical based on a case study. The corpus of the study comprised the six volumes of Masnavi, and data were collected through library research. In the analysis of the findings, the usage of the genitive case, its marker, and its specific forms in Masnavi sentences were determined. The various relationships between the head and its modifier with specific lexical items and combinations marked and desired by Rumi were clarified. Ultimately, the detachment and attachment of the genitive case and noun phrases were determined. The findings showed that a large part of Masnavi’s appeal and charm is due to the linguistic patterns used by Rumi, which is not the result of the rhythm and tone of Masnavi. Still, it should be searched for in meticulous and “detail-oriented” studies of grammatical construction and its morphological and syntactic patterns.