Stylistic-discursive Analysis of the Novel Osane Baba Sobhan by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi based on the Theory of Leslie Jeffries (Critical Stylistics Approach)

The present study has examined and analyzed the novel of “Baba Sobhan’s legend” in the framework of Lesley Jeffries' theory and based on the components of critical stylistics. In this regard, an attempt was made to answer the following questions: 1. How are the writer's ideologies represented in the way that the linguistic elements of the novel are chosen and arranged, which are interpreted as style? 2. What kinds of discourse elements have made it possible to discover the ideologies hidden in the style of the novel? So, the main purpose of this article is to reveal the hidden ideologies in the writer's utterances. For this purpose, the vocabularies and sentence structures of the novel, which provide the way for gaining the discourse style and the cognition of style, have been studied and analyzed. In this paper, through a descriptive-analytical approach, the authors have extracted and categorized Lesley Jeffries’ views which are mentioned in the book "Critical Stylistics". Then they have analyzed the novel considering the components of this book. Findings indicate that the strategies of "negating" and "prioritizing" are the most frequent, and "naming", "equating" and "assuming and implying" have the lowest frequency in this discourse. The analysis of these findings shows that the writer in his discourse, considering the conditions of society and serfdom system in Iran, has depicted the villagers’ socio-economic situation and the realities of their lives through a critical approach. He has also criticized the authorities in Iran in the years before the land reform.