The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isphahan as a Picaresque Novel

Rereading Persian novels from the perspective of genre classification is a necessity that is lacking in literary research. The main issue in this research is to study this novel as a Picaresque novel and to show Picaresque features in it. The necessity of conducting this research is that in this article, we investigate why this novel can be considered as a picaresque novel and Haji Baba as a Picaro character, and in addition, the historical, social and cultural context of the period of writing this work and the relationship between this type of novel and the situational context of the time of text production is also studied. According to the obtained results, this novel is a Picaresque novel due to its satirical and critical language, simplicity of writing, first person perspective, realism and having an episodic plot and Haji Baba is also due to possessing traits such as lying, cunning, shrewdness, belonging to the lower classes of society, being constantly traveling, being dependent and on a ration of many masters, and not being morally committed means a picaro hero. Also, the unsettled political, social and cultural situation in the period of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, caused chaos, insecurity and disorder in the society in Iran at that time and emerge of picaro people, which eventually led to the appearing of this narrative genre which critical-satirical approach to the situation and having picaro people is one of its important features and has favorably depicted the conditions of that era.