Stylistics and Literary Criticism in Iran: A Comparative Study ofLiterary Criticism and Bahar-e AdabJournals Published in 2010

There is a close relationship between stylistics and literary criticism. Many works of criticism are based on data analyses of stylistic studies، and analyzing status of the two fields—literary criticism and stylistics—couldpave the way for better classification of them. Through a content analysis of the two scholarly journals، Bahar-e Adab—proseand poetry stylistic studies—and Literary Criticism published in 2010، I have tried to show the relation between different aspects of the two fields in the previous decade in Iran. Both quantitative and qualitative indicators have been taken into consideration in this study. Quantitative indicators cover theoretical and practical domains. Qualitative indicators have been chosen according to a fewbasic questions on stylistics and literary criticism: have the articles on literary criticism transformed from descriptive nature into analytic one? Is critical thinking dominant in all studies? Do articles on stylistics consider works as representations of individuality of their author? The article concludes that، although the studies on stylistics and criticism، which in some cases follow the same academic or social discourse، seems to have correlation، there are some differences between the two fields. For example، when it comes to selecting texts، critics mostly tend to choose prose fiction while experts in stylistics prefer poetry. Impartial and independent theories and approaches are more widespread in literary criticism articles than in works of stylistics. Stylistic studies، on the other hand، are not independent. Most articles on criticism have passed descriptive mode and are closer to their expected form، i. e. analyses of the data. The number of articles on stylistics that clearly consider style as representation of the author’s personality or consider repetition of stylistic features as a deviation from standard rules is about half of the total number of the articles.