Aspects of Romanticism in Nafthat-al-Masdoor

Romanticism is one of those schools which emerged in the 18th century with the slogan of free expression of individual sentiments, naturalism, primitivism, imaginary view and … versus the rationalistic thought of classicism. Nafthat-al-Masdoor, as a historical and literary text, has certain similarities to romantic principles and basics and this provides the base for critical view of Romanticism in this work according to its stylistic features. According to semantic point of view, factors like paying attention to personal emotions and free expression of them, interpretive view to the nature, relying on secondary imagination for describing objective matters, drawing utopia and also linguistic factors such as foregrounding literary aspect of the text by using literary techniques like simile, metaphor, allusion and …, long and repeated descriptions and symbolism are some factors which have given Nafthat-al-Masdoor a romantic style. This article does not want to inject certain thought by a positivist view, but it tries to establish a new view to a classic text by naming the common features of Nafthata-al-Masdoor and Romanticism and at the same time by emphasizing literary speech and historical context for surveying the ways of meaning formation.