A Study of Qur’anic-Narrative Allusions in the Poetry Collection of Fazel Nazari

Allusion is one of the oldest and most widely used rhetorical devices, which because of, among others, compactness and linguistic brevity, the inclusion of a part of an absent text in a present text and the prominent role of the audience in merging and receiving this textual interference, has attracted the attention of poets in all periods and has added to the semantic richness and beauty of poetry. This literary device has been used in the poems of contemporary poets in more complex ways and with more variety of form and content, the analysis of which requires more detailed studies taking new approaches. On the other hand, Qur’anic stories are among the first texts that classical and contemporary Persian poets refer to in their allusions. Accordingly, in this study, the narrative-Qur’anic allusions in Fazel Nazari poetry were studied placing emphasis on the structural and formal diversity of his allusions to identify the most frequent narrative allusions as well as the methods and techniques using which he has employed the narrative allusions of the Qur’an in his poetry. A descriptive-analytical study of all six poetry books of Nazari showed that in terms of content, the stories of Adam (AS) and Yusuf (AS) are the most frequent Qur’anic allusions in his sonnets. Furthermore, structurally speaking, there are all kinds of combinational, multimodal, echoic, ironic, etc. allusions in his poems, which indicates the variety of applications and the complexities and artistic delicacies of this device in the poems of this poet.