The Intertextual Semiotics of Welcome to Hades Novel

One of the important themes of contemporary fiction is paying attention to the social status and the identity of women. Some writers have portrayed the problems of women by re-reading and recreating the ancient stories. The novel Welcome to Hades by Belqis Soleimani is a female writing that has an intertextual relationship with the story of Zal and Rudabeh in Shahnameh and expresses the problems of women in the current society of Iran. Therefore, this paper tries to study and analyze the intertextual relations of this work with Ferdowsi's Shahnameh based on Riffatter's theory of intertextual semiotics, to identify the mythical codifications and semantic implications of the novel, the study provides an interpretive and intertextual reading of this work. The result of this study indicates that Soleimani creates the semantic accumulation of “woman” and the descriptive systems of Shahnameh, “Rudabeh” and “Sheikhkhani tribe” by placing "non-instructions" in the text that contain the implicit meanings. In this way, she creates familiar hippograms or images in the minds of the readers that refer to the story of Zal and Rudabeh. The analysis of these intertextual relations shows that the matrix of this novel emphasizes the contrast between the role of women in Shahnameh (especially Rudabeh) in comparison with contemporary women who are caught in the limitations and incorrect social customs.