The Components of Text World Theory Applied in Tarikh-i Bayhaqi

Text world theory, which is derived from cognitive poetics, opens up new horizons to human beings to discover how the mind works and how to make a mental representation. From this point of view, the study of literary works is an effective step towards the construction of the author and audiences’ intellectual world and transferring the effects of text through textual signals. This article studies Tarikh-i Bayhaqi based on this approach. The three layers of “discourse world,” “text world,” and “sub-worlds” in this theory, and the small text worlds that create the original text world are shown. The dynamism of the text world in Tarikh-i Bayhaqi is less visible due to its historical narrative. The author, using world-building elements and function-advancing propositions, has produced a narrative-report construct and character-based and, in some cases, environment-based descriptions in this text. Changing the temporal and spatial conditions of narrations and guiding the various narratives through the sub-worlds force the reader to conceptualize the worlds with variable spaces. Of course, the conceptualization process implies the mobility of this action.