Typological Analysis of Tazkirat al-Awliyā Farid al-Din Attar with Reference to Architextuality Studies

Intertextuality studies are considered as one of the most recent approaches to literary criticism. In this approach to literary criticism, it is believed that no text is independent of prior texts and texts are written with reference to earlier texts. Intertextuality, as a field of study, was first introduced on the basis of the ideas of Julia Kristeva and was extended and developed by Gérard Genette into a unified and systematic discipline after three generations of theorists. Genet called his body of works transtextuality and divided them into five categories: intertextuality, transtextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality and architextuality. Architextuality focuses on the relationship of a work of art with its literary genre. In Persian literature, each literary text belongs to a specific literary genre. Tazkirat al-Awliyā by Farid al-Din Attar is one of those literary texts which, despite the fact that it belongs to general biographies, has some very specific features that distinguishes it from other types of biographies. This study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between Tazkirat al-Awliyā and its literary genre drawing on the notions of architextuality. This study illustrates that Tazkirat al-Awliyā is a didactic poets’ biography and a mystical epic that has a special place in literary texts.