A Biographical Narrative Study of Nafsat-al-Masdur

For its style and content, Nafsat-al-Masdur, the work of Shahab al-Din Mohammad Nasavi Khorandezi Zeydari, has always been considered as a canonical text in classical history and literature. In line with the new approaches in narratology and interdisciplinary studies, this work moves beyond the traditional classical studies of history and literature and enters into new domains of narratology and contemporary criticism. Genre and narratological studies of Nafsat-al-Masdur present different genres embedded in the work. These genres, such as autobiography, epistolary, and nonfiction, are intertextually intermingled in a historical context and problematize simplistic literary categorizations of Nafsat-al-Masdur. Also, different academic readings, in line with the narration and aesthetics tradition of the sixth century (S. H.), have degraded Nasavi’s peculiar narration style in restating the events to an insignificant piece of literature and deformed his primary objectives. The present article studies the generic and narrative structure of Nafsat-al-Masdur in an attempt to categorize the work as Ekhvaniyat and claims that although it has earned historical recognition due to its treatment of important people and events in the Mongol era, it cannot and should not be regarded as a multi-genric work.