Sadegh Hedayat’s Historical Drama from the View of New Historicism Theory

This study was an attempt to examine some of Sadegh Hedayat’s literary and historical works from the perspective of new historicism. Sadegh Hedayat wrote these works in a period when Reza Shah Pahlavi was promoting a type of archaism in Iranian society. Based on this romantic view, it is attempted to recall the glories that a country once used to enjoy, and thus, to propagate that it is possible to return to such a past. In his early years of writing career and in such plays as Parvin, Sassan’s Daughter and Māzīyār, Sadegh Hedayat addressed Iran’s glorious past. However, Hedayat’s romantic approach was different from the romanticism promoted by Reza Shah Pahlavi. Hedayat’s romanticism is a lamentation for an Iran whose pure nature has been contaminated with humiliation and degeneracy by the Arab invasion. An ancient Iranian first resists this invasion but gradually surrenders. Arab’s wretched nature increasingly penetrates into the Iranian’s pure and sublime nature, and finally, in Blind Owl historical nowel, the pure nature is metamorphosed and destroyed within this ignoble nature. Hence, in Hedayat’s works, one can identify a course of destruction of the Iranian identity, which is irreversible, while Reza Shah Pahlavi’s romanticism considers the possibility of the restoration of the glorious ancient time. In addition to these intertextual dissociations, there are other dissociations that can be observed in Hedayat’s works in terms of the encounter between the ancient Iranians and the invading Arabs.