Allegory, Its Forms and Function in Five Historical Texts

Conveying the message to the reader is the main function of prose, especially a historical text. Therefore, such a text should use less rhetorical methods that hinder the achievement of this goal. However, since in Persian literature, poetry has been the dominant literary medium and prose has been influenced by it, prose has inevitably adopted various literary techniques that are specific to poetry. Even historical prose, whose job it is to report the history directly and without the intervention of poetic emotion, is no exception. Even some historians, instead of remaining faithful to their historiographical task and only recounting historical events, have adopted a literary tradition and have become literati-historians. One of the literary devices employed by such historians is “allegory.” So far, most researchers have studied the use of allegory in poetry, and have paid less attention to its presence in Persian prose. Thus, using a documentary-analytical method, this article examines this literary approach in the important texts of historical prose in order to evaluate the historiography of the authors of these books. It tries to demonstrate that the authors of historical texts use various forms of allegory and this does not prevent their texts from conveying their messages, but helps transmit objective concepts and retell historical facts to the reader.