Techniques of Creating Fantasy in Stories of »Mohammad Reza Shams«

Fantasy has various types including fairy-tales, allegorical, realistic, philosophical and grotesque and so on. Fantasies have been classified from one perspective into general and modern and from another to worldly and supernatural. It can be said that what discriminates different types of fantasies from one another is the kind of imagination used in them. But what they have in common is the creation of an imaginative and fictional world. The creation of this imaginative and fictional world is done through the techniques that are not fixed and well-known in all fantasy works but can be understood through various studies. In this research, by studying four fictions of Mohammad Reza Shams, the authors have identified eleven techniques for creating fantasy, some of which are novel in comparison to previous studies like choosing the narrator and the pseudo-insane hero, anachronism, objectivization of allegories, curses, and prayers, using the archetypes and magical characters of ancient fictions, establishing a story based on proverbs and popular culture, and bringing back a decedent to life. Also, various types of fantasy, such as realistic, philosophical, fairy-like, allegorical, grotesque and fantasy of objects can be found in Shams's stories.