Revisiting the Meaning of Love in the Discourse of Tarsoosi’s Dârâbnâmeh as a Long Folklore Story

Discourse in stories is formed through a combination of meaningful and reciprocal relations between the narrator and listener and in association with socio-political and metatextual factors. This is constructed via the replacement of love-related themes rather than chivalry and heroic, as related to narrative links between the structure and functions of love. Dârâbnâmeh, due to its associations with social events and the listeners’ needs during the period of creating and recreating the stories (i.e., Sasanian, Ghaznavids, or Ghorian), prepares a good ground for this research. The present study was conducted at two levels, namely, the structure and function of love. The findings reveal that in replacing the love-related themes with those of chivalry, the representation of love is primarily shaped. This means that the story’s reliance on one of its reflective settings, such as epic-religious texts or the time of recreation, is revealed. The narrator, later, by focusing on that represented love, illustrates love affairs through the four main constructs, namely, lovers’ dates, problems and troubles, lovers’ reunion, and death. As such, creating the meaning of the story becomes possible. Accordingly, in Dârâbnâmeh, this point has been achieved through the representation of religious love, the illustration of love affairs, and homogenous and suprematic national-royal discourse with a paternal perspective.