Short allegorical tales in Iran’s contemporary literature

This article revolves round the features and types of contemporary short allegorical tales. In the contemporary literary tales, each of the authors have made use of techniques of contemporary story telling while also benefitting from ancient narration approaches and techniques such as figurative speech. The contemporary authors, based on their aesthetical goals, and at times for the purpose of concealing their critical concepts, have resorted to figurative speech. Meanwhile, there are structural and theme-related differences between the ancient and contemporary allegorical tales. In ancient allegorical tales, the author or the poet usually presents an interpretation of the allegory at the end of the allegorical tale. However, the contemporary story writers leave attainment of an understanding of the allegorical tales to readers. The contemporary authors precisely study and narrate the initial layer of the story, which is usually not the case in ancient allegorical tales. The ancient narrative authors and poets made use of the allegory to teach and reinforce their thoughts and ideas, while the contemporary authors make use of allegories in order to present social, political, and philosophical criticisms. The contemporary short allegorical talks, based on their narration structure and literary type, are divided into realistic short figurative tales, figurative tales based on magical realism, fables, figurative tales, and satirical figurative tales. The majority of themes of theses contemporary short allegorical tales revolve round social and political topics, which have been narrated based on a critical and at times bitter outlooks.