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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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The following issues will be explored in this article:

Mohammad Taghi Bahar's attitude toward the important international developments including the first and second world war and the consequences of the 2 wars; the situations of Iran and some Asian and European governments in the 2 wars. Given the enormous effect of political pacts and agreements between Iran and other government on the cultural, social and political affairs of our country, the Bahar's reaction to these pacts and the political and military interference of foreign countries especially Russia, England and US are worth considering within a cultural and historical framework.

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Varaqeh-o- Golshah is a beautiful and charming story, which Ayyuqi has put into verse.

The analysis of the components and the elements composing a story paves the way for the story to be known much better and reveals its merits and demerits. We have, therefore, had a structuralist look at the plot of the story as one of its basic elements.

In the story Varaqeh, the protagonist, aims at marrying Golshah. To this end he faces the resistance of the opponent forces; so the conditions of his own balanced life and those of his tribe are disturbed. But later on the protagonist succeeds to overcome his opponents with the helpful forces and achieves his aim. He also succeeds to restore the balanced and organized conditions – which are the result of the story’s events – to his life and that of his tribe.

The events that happen in the story form four Sequences in its plot. In this writing, as mentioned, the plots of the story and its consisting components have been analyzed from the viewpoint of structuralism.

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Social Realism belonging to the domain of art and literature is a type of political aesthesiam affirming the mechanical unity of idealogic and static principles. The post-revolution theoretical discussions of this literary school in Octobr 1917 were inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, Friedri Engels and Veladimir IIych Lenin. The Mother by Maxim Gorki is the masterpiece written in this era. The basic principles of Social Realism, emphasizing the realistic reflections in the social domain of artistic productions and philanthropy were approved in Moscow, Augest- September 1934. Although this congress was a literary one, but its principles were generalized to other domains of art, i.e. painting, music and cinema etc. Social Realism was rather concerned with making changes in the of literary works.This is why some themes such as fighting capitalism, historical optimism, war, revolution, informed history-orientasion, labourer, revoluton leaders and red army were taken up by literature and art field.      

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Communication is one of the main functions of language. Linguistic communication usually combines with other modes of interaction such as nonverbal communication. People’s nonverbal behaviors display their styles and personality characteristics. Therefore, the fictionists and historians tend to reflect the quality and quantity of the character’s nonverbal relationship in their narration. The present study examines the adventure of Hanging of the Hasanak Minister in Tarikh-e Beyhaqi in order to show how Beyhaqi succeeds to imagine, objectify and portray the events of Qaznavi's periods and how it could improve the dramatic capacity of historical text with accuracy in nonverbal communication using a descriptive-analytical method and an interdisciplinary approach. This study displays that Beyhaqi often uses nonverbal communication in order to complete the verbal communication; but in many cases, they are replaced by verbal behavior or control the verbal behaviors.

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Modernist novel and short story have played a significant role in modern retouching of mythical narratives and in their recreation in the contemporary narrative literature. One of the major reasons for the particular attention of these novels and short stories to mythical roots is the necessity that the recent authors feel due to alterations in social conditions as well as the fundamental transformations in human’s intellect and attitude. The disorder in today’s chaotic world, the discourses of which are full of contradictions, irregularities, and rule aversion has intrigued today’s man in incoherent, nonlinear and discontinuous narratives abundant with temporal disorders, a characteristic which has a rich background in mythical narratives. A prominent writer in contemporary Persian literature is Shahriyar Mandanipour, the works of whom can resemble mythical narratives in terms of both the structure and the processing of some elements of story, specially the element of time. This study attempts to demonstrate that just like in some mythical narratives, in some of the stories by Mandanipour, 1- time is qualitative and mental not quantitative and objective; 2- time takes its validity from the narrated event or phenomenon; and 3- time is circular and cyclic not linear and straight. Of course, confirming these resemblances does not necessarily imply that Shahriar Mandanipour has consciously been influenced by mythical narratives

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Najdi is one of the outstanding contemporary writers due to his specific style. He has a different attitude towards human life and cultural elements of Iran, which makes his stories a good subject for discussion and research. In this article, two stories of Najdi are analyzed in the light of Deconstruction: “The Day of Asb-rizi” and “The Night of Killing Sohrab”. Deconstruction is mostly based on Derrida’s theory. It originated and was initially used in Philosophy and then it spread to literary criticism. The aim of Deconstruction is to find the binary oppositions, to analyze them in order to reveal the contradictory points and to deny the accepted assumptions. The results of this process is to doubt those beliefs that have been considered as axiomatic up to that time. In Najdi’s stories, the binary oppositions include man/animal, man/nature and man and civilization. In “The Day of Asb-rizi”, the opposition between man and animal, and, freedom and slavery causes some contradictions in the major themes of the story. In “The Night of Killing Sohrab”, the binary opposition is that of harsh patriarchal world/ innocent childish world, or, experience/inexperience.

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In this paper, Persian short storyis studied in the light ofTzvetanTodorov’s Narrative Theory. The hypothesis of this research is that there are various types of relations among the sequences, and each relation serves one or more functions. For this purpose, seven collections of Persianshort stories written by outstanding writers were selected. These collections consist of 63 short stories, beginningwith Jamalzadeh, the founder of this genre in Persian literature, and ending with Ahmad Mahmoud covering a period of fifty years. After analyzing deductively the selected stories it is demonstrated that there are many kinds of relations among the sequences of narratives, such as contrastive relation, memorial relation and stichomythic relation. In addition, each of these relations serves some functions, such as prescience, foregrounding of the story’s content and creation of suspense.

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Despairing of God’s absolution is the most essential trait in Satan that has long been taken into consideration. In Masnavi and Shams Sonnets, Satan is regarded as an outcast, damned and hopeless character, but on special occasions, Rumi reveals hope to frustrated individuals and looks at creation story from a different perspective. This perspective is in line with tradition of defending Satan in our mystical culture, the tradition that is in contrast with traditional mystical approach to Satan, a narrow and obsolete but outstanding and thoughtful tradition. Although hinting at Satan’s hopefulness has been noticed in a few studies prior to Rumi, his eloquence and perspective in this area is unique, a perspective originated from his worldview. Noteworthy to say, even in the legacy of those mystics defending Satan there is not as much emphasis on this issues as Rumi’s and Satan mostly appears in the role of a tragic lover.

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In allegories polysemy relates not only to the context and the audience’s understanding but also to the structural characters of these texts. This paper investigates the function of structural and narrative properties in the creation of multiple interpretations of an allegory. Focusing on the events and following a unique story-line is the most important trait in helping to read the allegories. Thus, polysemy in allegories is also related to the number of the story-lines. Therefore, polysemy in allegories depends on two axes: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. In the first process, multiple interpretations are parallel with the various story-lines. These lines are themselves the result of the many characters and sequences. But in the second process, polysemy is only one story-line and based on the various textual meanings may offer different interpretations of one allegory. This classification may lead to some important results in the polysemy of literary symbols in literary texts.

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Speech representation is one of the most important tools which is used by writers in writing narrative texts and specifically stories. Although direct and indirect speech, which are two speech representation categories, are familiar names in Persian language, speech representation has been neglected in Persian language. This article investigates and compares different speech representation categories used in Persian stories written before translation movement in Qajar era and stories written after this movement and assesses the frequency, functional and linguistic characteristics of each category. For this purpose, the Semino and Short’s model of speech representation (2004) which is based on Leech and Short’s model (1990) is used. The research data is elicited from 7 stories written before translation movement and other 7 stories written after this movement in equal volumes. Finally, we conclude that (free) direct speech is the most frequent category in the stories written before and after translation movement and this is because of the nature of this category in producing the effects of dramatization and vividness. Also, the high frequency of (free) direct speech in recent stories can be related to the key role of characters’ individuality in modern novels. Moreover, the use of (free) direct speech and narrator’s representation of speech acts as the speech representation categories have decreased during the time but the use of indirect speech and specifically free indirect speech have increased.

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Mantiqu't-Tair, a description of human love for self-scrutiny and meeting with God, is the most significant mystical work of Attar in the form of allegory of birds in search of Simurgh or phoenix. The contradictory presence of the author as a mystic and a historian at the beginning of the book is astonishing. Although the introduction is short and distinct from the mystical text, it is of great importance owing to the interaction of mysticism and history. The historian tries to discover the truth based on the valid documentations and through a retrospective look into the past and carefully analyzing the accuracy of historical quotes and reviews whereas the mystic avoids politics and analysis. In general, history is independent of mysticism but it is the best support for the mystic. Attar is a creative mystic in the sense of innovating mystical symbols and sometimes creating historical characters out of mystical symbols, while he is oblivious to the judgment of history. Symbolizing the historical figures and disregarding the historical documentations, in addition to invalidating his judgment of the individuals, have other outcomes, including a crisis of reasoning and a rejection of mystical principles that Attar himself adheres to. This study is conducted to prove this claim in the introduction of Mantiqu't-Tair.

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The Tragic story of Siavash is one the significant and remarkable stories in Firdausi’s Shahnameh. In this article, the authors will study this story through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis and based on Van Leeuwen’s network of Social Actors. This is to show how social interactors have been portrayed and see how the poem has reproduced and represented the discourses by linguistic parameters. To this end, dialogic couplets have been singled out, categorized and analyzed. The findings show that Firdausi has equally used latent and manifest parameters. Therefore, concealment of the narrators is as important :as char:acterization and the development of the setting. Moreover, although the story of Siavash is an ancient narrative, it carries with itself Firdausi’s worldview and his emotional, ideological overtone and thus represents Iranian’s idealism, their zeal for identity and conflict between Good and Evil and the final triumph of the Good. The death of Siavash entails the vengeance of the Iranians, and the birth of his son, Keykhosrow, brings about the victory over Afrasiab.

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One of the most important issues in narratologicalstudy of Masnavi is methods of reading and interpreting the allegories. The relationship between this subject and narration is best revealed when we attend to the relationship between interpretations and storylines, regardless of the content of those interpretations. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the methods by which Mawlawiinterpreted the allegories narrated in Masnavi. It can be said that presenting the interpretations on the syntagmatic axis is the most important property of Masnavi. To interpret these stories, Mawlawi reads these as separated storylines, then, presents an interpretation corresponding to each of them. Multiplicity of these storylines is the result of two factors: Multiplicity of characters and Multiplicity of sequences. In this process, the value of main storylines is equal to subsidiary ones. Therefore, sometimes, the motivation (initial interpretation) of telling an allegory is not proportionate to the final and medial ones. The validity of the storylines for presenting the interpretations is both a factor for polysemy of allegories of Masnavi, and a presenter of a narratological explanation for association in Masnavi.

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At some historical points, all classes and professions of a society, despite all the differences and disagreements, flow into one single stream to reach a higher goal. Iranians have had this historical experience many times throughout history: during the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), and also in the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In the Constitutional Revolution, all classes and professions of the society sought a higher goal that was the eradication of despotism and the establishment of the reign of law. In this Revolution, Persian literature, including poetry and prose, was at the service of the Revolution and satire became the revolutionaries’ main media. Literature of this era became so thoroughly mixed with politics that we can consider the great literati of this period as the great makers of the history of Iran. In this article, we have tried to explore and prove their importance.

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This research explains the principles governing major codes of "Hodhod" and "Simorgh" in the Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr, and codes of "The King of Birds" and the "Storyteller Bird" in the Avicenna's Risalat Al-Tayr. The significance of this study lies in its endeavor to abolish ambiguities regarding the meanings of these cods which due to personal and subjective trends of interpretation and commentary on these allegorical works is institutionalized. This study tackles the issue of necessary allegorical and coded writing styles when texts came to deal with epistemological concepts which was a result of conceptual conflicts that existed from fifth century to seventh century, and forced interpretations on texts’ meanings which were merely a reflection and satisfaction of expectations of critics of an age. This study is library research and is based on a thorough examination of the content of relevant literature on this subject, each in its pertinent context, followed by a co-examination of intersections between the texts and the contexts. This study concludes its premises through deep analysis and critically supported interpretations. The findings of this study reveal the contradictions that govern interpretations of the aforementioned concepts. Furthermore, findings of this study demonstrate the necessity of further investigation in this field


 

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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 two ancient civilizations of Iran and India, due to their long-standing cultural, political and economic relations, have had a relative cognition of each other's identity, which has, over time, become more logical, complete, and at times symbolic. Undoubtedly, in order to understand the history of Iran and India in ancient times and how these two nations interacted, we must inevitably find the historical image of India in Iranian culture. The study of myth, epic literature and versifications helps us to reach historical realities. Shahnameh can represent Iranian and Indian history and culture. In this research, we seek to answer the main question by using descriptive-analytical method and library resources. To a large extent, Firdowsi has remained faithful to historical sources and Pahlavi texts in Shahnameh. The text shows that Firdowsi has followed the sources that have been used and there is no significant difference between them especially those of the Sassanid era, such as Karnameh Ardeshir Babakan, A Relic from Zariran and Kodaynamak and Shahnameh. 
 

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Narrative process and its narrative mechanisms help the reader make sense of the way events happen in a story. Using repeating images in the text of a story is a method of narrative development.  In Shahnameh, dealing with the world and images it gives rise to is one of the central motives of the text. The narrator in different parts of the poem seems captivated by the image of the world and this fact impedes narrative progress. This article intends to analyze “the images of the world” in “the story of Siavash” in Shahname from Gerard Genette’s perspective, employing his five narrative features. This narrative by the use of prior narration, repeating narration and focalization presents an image of the world, this technique also pinpoints the way a specific image of a special theme has the potential to reduce the speed of reader comprehension by tampering with the order of events narrated or actions or by disrupting narrative time, and as a result it can boost the texts suspense or the reader’s interest in knowing how the events will evolve.
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Based on the theory of reflection in the sociology of art, literature in its broadest sense is a mirror of society that reflects the orientations, tastes and social currents and helps to dissect the society better than science and technology. In particular, among literary works, short stories and novels are more dependent on social life than other types of literature, and while being affected by changes in society, they themselves are the source of change and show the changes in societies. In this way, by recognizing the fluctuations and changes of the world inside the main characters of the stories, a path can be found to know the transformations and changes in the world outside them. The purpose of this study is to examine the image of the main character in Houshang Golshiri’s short stories. In this regard, an attempt was made to conduct a comparative content analysis of the works using the descriptive-analytical method and by extracting the characteristics of the main characters of Golshiri’s short stories in the 60s and 70s (Persian Calendar) and by identifying the main socio-political events and currents of the years following the victory of the Islamic Revolution. The results show that in his collection of stories Golshiri directly and indirectly presented a part of the mentalities and thoughts of intellectuals, artists and the middle class of his time and there is a close relationship between the spiritual, political, social and cultural characteristics of the main characters of each collection of stories with the prevailing socio-political situation of that period. This corresponds to the author’s political and social perception of the developments of the period because when the status of society changes, some of these characteristics also change.