The Role of Motif Study in Determining the Literary Genre of Narratives: Based on Dārāb-Nāmeh, Qirān Habaši, Musayyab-Nāmeh

Knowledge of literary genres is one of the oldest and most influential intertextual approaches that has been used to classify texts since the past and has been subject to change. But the background of the theory of genres in Iran is less than a century, and its justified application in a comprehensive way in many fields and literary trends is still facing ambiguities and challenges. For example, in classifying ancient narratives, the question arises: on what basis and with what considerations can the dominant literary genres in these texts be proved? The lack of serious research and criticism in response to this question has led researchers over the decades to classify ancient Persian stories by resorting to self-invented, unscientific literary terms without methodological explanation, while the common terms not only fail to give a comprehensive indication of the content and linguistic characteristics of such narratives, but even keep them in a genre indecision or lead them to several similar genres. Since one of the functions of motif study is to determine the literary genre of the texts, the present study has attempted to draw on the Aristotelian theory of genres to utilize this potential talent and prove for the first time through the method of inductive reasoning and relying on the statistical community based on the study various motifs of three stories of Abu Tahir Tarsusi that their literary genres belong to the epic.