پژوهشنامه ادبیات داستانی
سال یکم شماره 1 (زمستان 1391)

To whatever language and people love stories belong, they guarantee fun and pleasure to their professional readers. Among such stories are Nezami Ganjavi's "Leily va Majnoun" and the French Joseph Bedier's "Tristan and Iseut." The present article has attempted to analyze them comparatively. At the beginning, it takes a short look at the lives and works of Nezami and Bedier and at the general development of their works with a look at the summary of the work of each writer. In a next part, it provides a comparative analysis of their works from the perspective of familial situations of the characters in their works, how the characters in each work know each other, how their love adventures are revealed, how the lovers in each work pass their lives in their waywardness, the fictional space in each work, and the role of religious and cultural factors in the formation of each of them. Then, the present article compares these works in the stasis and/or dynamism of their main characters, in how they marry and die, and in the description in each work of the battle field. In the end, it provides a conclusion in which the findings of the study are discussed.

In the love poem "Khosrow va Shirin" two love relations are narrated which are virtual (corporal) in nature. One is the mutual love which takes shape between Khosrow and Shirin, and the other one is the one-way love which only the former has for the latter. Considering the definitions and categorizations of love provided by Avicenna, the love between Khosrow and Shirin was firstly a virtual animalistic love which was based on the bodily beauties of Khosrow's mistress; that is, Khosrow falls in love with Shirin only after he hears Shahpour describing her as a physically charming woman. Shirin, too, falls in love with Khosrow when she sees a portrait of him which only shows his physical charm. However, at the end of the story, when via chastity and forbearance the mistress controls their love from falling into passion and debauchery, their virtual physical love, which was heretofore based on outer beauty and corporal charm, is changed to a virtual spiritual love based on inner beauty and the soul similarities of the lover and beloved. Farhad's love to Shirin is a one-way unrequited love which he never articulates and which he keeps alive only in his dreams. This suppressed unrequited love cannot be considered Ozry love also, because with the exception of one feature of Ozry Love, which is that the lover dies of love, Farhad's love has none of the features of Ozry love: the beloved's refuse to come to union with the lover and (her) concealing the secret of love. Farhad's love to Shirin is, as it was said, a one-way love, because there is nothing in the story to suggest the love of the latter to the former. One can say that Farhad's one-way love to Shirin is a marginal narrative which the author creates for characterizing Khosrow and Shirin.

Baharestan is a Persian prose text which was written by Jami in 892 (A. H., lunar calendar) on the style of Golestan. It includes tales and anecdotes which the author has compiled and put together with respect to the subject of each of the 8 chapters of his work. The present article intends to answer 2 questions connected with this document. One question is if Jami has originally created his tales and anecdotes depending on his own muse, or if his work is an adaptation of the texts before him. Another question is if the writers after Jami have used the tales and anecdotes in Baharestan. To provide due answers to these questions, a number of stories in Jami's work were extracted and analytically compared with some texts before and after it. This study shows that, in agreement with Persian story-writing conventions of the ancient times, Jami has taken many of his tales and anecdotes from the texts before him without citing their bibliographies, and that the story-writers after Jami have also benefitted from the stories in his work.

The story "Mehr-va-Mah" is a Persian folkloric story which has been preserved both in poem and prose. Jamali Dehlavi and Hoseyni Shirazi have provided us with two verse adaptations of this story in the form of couplets. And the author of the prose version of the story, which appeared in the 9th century, is anonymous. Due to the presence in this story of fairies and magical characters, it can be put in the category of fairy tales. The present paper is a comparative analysis. The main problem of it is to analyze the typical Iranian folkloric story on the basis of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale. The purpose of the paper is to examine the religious functions of "Mehr-va-Mah," the functions which were surely lacking in Propp's divisions. In this way, the real attempt of this study is to provide an Iranian model of morphology in the space of our native story and on the basis of the work of the Russian writer. This study will help us to identify the manifestations of religious functions in this story in actions like praying, betting, fasting, intercession, thanks-giving, and prostration. The author of "Mehr-va-Mah" has chosen his helpers from among the religious celebrities. Prophet Mohammad (P. B. U. H.) and Imam Ali (P. B. U. H.) are two religious celebrities in this story who, according to Propp's classifications, play the role of the helper.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad is one of the Persian writers of allegorical stories. “Sargozashet-e Kandouha” ("The Hives Story") and “Noon-val-Ghalam” ("By the Pen") are two of his tales which confirm this claim. His novel, Nefrin-e Zamin (Curse of the Earth), is an allegorical representation of the causes and outcomes of the development of a traditionally feudal society to a society based on economic capitalism. The present article is an attempt to investigate allegory in this work with regard to the style, language, and thought of the work, which are reflected in the other works of the author also, with regard to some marks available in the details of the text (characters in particular), to its story narrated on a primary level, as well as with regard to the meaning of the story, and to some guides provided by the author himself. However, our main purpose is to show the degree of artistry in the work of Al-e Ahmad, to convey the main message of Nefrin-e Zamin, and to describe the nature of evidences in it. To convey his allegorical meanings, Al-e Ahmad has taken use, on the allegorical level of this work, of the bearing, appearance, stature, profession, and the views of his characters, and of the nature, function, and the type of the things (around him).

Sociology of literature is a new and inter-disciplinary knowledge the subject of which is the influence of society on literature on the one hand, and the influence of literature on society on the other. The typical novel is more deeply affected by the social situation than any other literary genre, and it can reflect the social structure. Salha-ye Abri, a 4-volume novel by Ali Ashraf Darvishian, is a completely realistic story all the adventures of which are the personal experiences and eye-witnesses of the writer. The purpose of the present article in sociologically criticizing Darvishian's work is an illustration of different classes of the society represented in the novel and a description of their cultural and economic situations. The writers thinkthat through an analytical criticism of the text of Salha-ye Abri, it provides the reader with a realistic situation of the Iranian society under the reign of Pahlavi I and II which historically coincides with the emergence of events shown in the novel.

As a basic element in fiction, dialogue plays an important role in the development of the plot and action of the story, in the communication among its characters, and in the revelation of their mentalities. When a story is narrated in the form of a dialogue, it is comparatively more dramatic, and its reader is therefore directly engaged with more natural and exciting scenes. Esmail Fasih, a modern Iranian story writer, is known as one of the most hard-working authors of the contemporary times. His texts, in each of which the life story of a member of "Aryan" family is narrated, often make a cycle of which each text is inter-connected with the other ones. In his fiction, Fasih has successfully employed dialogue in the development of artistically effective plots and characterizations. The present study takes to investigate the role of dialogue and its relation with the other story elements in the works of Esmail Fasih.