نشریه نثر پژوهی ادب فارسی
سال چهاردهم شماره 28 (بهار 1391)

In the prologue to love story of Bijan and Manijeh, Ferdowsi presents a meaningful description of a night. This is, in fact, a foreshadowing to the story and the difficulties the heroes encounter in the land of Turan. Along with his engagement to the motif of the battle between good and evil, or light and darkness, in the Iranian doctrine – the most striking example of which in Shahnameh is the battle between Iran and Turan– Ferdowsi employs similes for describing the night originating from the ancient Iranian beliefs. The mythical accounts of these beliefs are given in Pahlavi books, and through studying these sources, directly or indirectly, Ferdowsi has employed them. Based on the sources from the Iranian Middle period such as Bundahishn, Pahlavi Rivayat, Mēnōg ī xrad and Vizīdagīhā ī Zādisparam, the present study examines the implicit links of Firdowsi with Iran's ancient beliefs and traditions in the prologue of Bijan and Manijeh.

In his surroundings, man deals with the names of people, places, animals, plants, things, … for most of which, he has no idea as to the origin of their nomination. One of the questions, occupying the curious mind of man, is to find the actual relationship between the signifier and the signified.Nomenclature is widely used in literature especially in Gnostic texts. Due to their individual viewpoints, poets and Gnostics look around themselves differently which leads to a unique sense of creativity in the process of mystical nomination. Recognizing different ways of nomination helps understand Gnostic texts. For this reason, this study focuses on two questions: the sources of nomination for Gnostic texts, and how the Gnostics benefitted from nomination devices in expressing the ideal Gnostic meanings.

This study deals with the works and biography of Ghasemi Gonabadi based on the notes collected while correcting the eight Mathnavis of the poet, considering other contemporary biographies as well. The originality of the subject lies in the new findings of the author regarding issues such as Ghasemi's birth, life, family, his children and trips, his masters, the people he praised, other poets named in his works and the ups and downs of his life. Since there is not a comprehensive biography of Ghasemi Gonabadi, the present study attempts to present an authoritative account of the poets.

Compound words include two or more lexical morphemes which at least contain two bases both of which are words or considered as stem of morphemes. Transparent words are words whose meanings can be guessed from their sounds or constructions. There are some relations between the sounds or the constructions of these words and their meanings for example "chek chek" and "khod nevis" in Persian. Opaque words, on the other hand, are words whose meanings cannot be guessed e.g. "Kaghaz". In this research various definitions of semantic transparency and opacity were provided. For data analysis, 500 compound words were selected from Dehkhoda dictionary and analyzed with respect to semantic transparency and opacity. Six criteria were used: 1- The frequency of head and modifier 2- The syntactic relation between two parts of the compounds 3- The criteria of indicators 4- Referring meaning, 5- Being independent or non-independent of the head 6- The whole meaning of the compound. In the beginning of data analysis 3 categories were studied: 1- adverb+verb stem 2- noun+verb stem, 3- adjective+verb stem. It was shown that acting as a full indicator, the existence of opposition and the existence of syntactic relation between two parts and the quality of being referential will be effective in semantic transparency and opacity. Then the degrees of semantic transparency and opacity were studied and it was shown that there are 14 degrees in semantic transparency and opacity with respect to the used criteria.

An important religious and Islamic question which has inspired Persian poets is the subject of our prophet’s ascension to heaven. Most of them, according to their religious beliefs, have depicted this subject in some of their famous works.Based on verses from Quran, authentic traditions, and works of interpreters and biographers, this study, provides a thematic analysis of Dehlavi's Books of Ascension. The aim is to find about his viewpoint about the prophet's ascension and the way he has been influenced by it. His verification of the prophet's physical ascension and the sight of God, the variety of subjects, the influence of Islamic culture on the poet and his great poetic power and imagination are the most important conclusions of this study.

In Islamic culture, what has been introduced as "mystical states and stages" was first presented as moral and faith-related concepts in Quran and the Prophet's Sunna, and gradually transformed into Prophet's companions, followers and other Muslim's actions. The inwardly and spiritual aspect of the states and stages and their impact upon human soul changed their state form moral to spiritual and inwardly; the phrase "mystical terms", therefore, came into being. According to some of Sunnite mystics, the first person to discuss mystical states and stages in Islam was Imam Ali. Afterwards the subject of mystical states and stages has been taken into consideration and developed by his companions and also ascetics and mystics. Drawing upon the original mystical texts, the present study examines when the concept of mystical states and stages emerged and how it evolved until late 5th century Hegira.

Epigrams refer to a literary genre containing some exciting events which lead to laughter. The structure and content of this literary genre will be investigated in this article and it will be shown that epigrams divide into some categories based on their form and content. It is finally concluded that the devices which evoke laughter are the same figures of speech which create beauty in Persian prose and verse.

In all oral traditions, so far a tale is not written down and is carried down through generations by heart, its primary structure would most likely be changed or distorted. The more the time passes, these changes accumulate more until the tale may be completely different from the real and original one. Main character's identity and the reality of events may also be distorted during this alteration time. Since oral tales are of great importance to Sufism, there are many examples of these changes in this culture. Sometimes written tales move to the realm of oral tradition and then back again into the written form with changes in some aspects.

This study examines the reflection of birds story in Mantiq-o-Tayr by Attar in the "Ostoqos" story by Simin Daneshvar. The objective is to determine the extent to which Daneshvar has taken advantage of old Persian literature in order to achieve the post-modernist theme of her story. To make a comparison between the two stories, first the seven structural elements in Propp's morphology were presented - with some variation. Next, the association between these elements and the mythological beliefs was explained. It was revealed that the basis for both narratives has been the primary mythological origin of their heroes, leading to the creation of Daneshver's story.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy known – by modern Europe - as hermeneutics dealing with textual relations in a context of signs. In order to interpret a text, the critic may appeal to epistemology to distinguish objects and subjects in a text.Based on the epistemological approach, the present study first examines the theoretical origins of the idea of womanhood and then, drawing on an epistemological diagram, deals comparatively with the subjective and objective elements in the works of some Persian poetesses from the beginning of Constitutionalism until recent decade in Iran.

This article aims at studying the existence and the number of diphthongs in Persian language. Reviewing the current works on Persian phonology reveals that there are controversies over this issue. Firstly the article defines diphthong, and then the most important different views are presented, analyzed and discussed. Using some criteria including phonetic, morphophonemic, and morphological as well as articulatory and historical features reveals that in Persian language diphthongs cannot be formed. In some cases also the accompanying of glides and vowels cannot phonologically led to forming diphthongs, though in sometimes phonetically they can have the features of diphthongs.

Islamic mystics have always been engaged with the issue of "Heart". In order to understand the concept of "Heart" and its position in Islamic mysticism, especially in Rumi's ideas, this study, firstly, provides and examines views from Quran, tradition, mystics and thinkers such as lmam Mohammad Ghazali, Sheikh Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, Sanaee Ghaznavi, Ayn-al-Quzzat Hamadani, Saad-ad-Din Hemaviyeh, Najm-al-din Razi and Abdol-kareem Qsheiri. Then some verses from Mathnavi are brought as examples to study Rumi's viewpoint regarding the issue of "Heart".

This paper seeks to explore the ideas of as the author of “The Four Essays” and extracts the principles and basics of authorship from his words. These ideas could be considered as the conventional theory of authorship which used to be the benchmark of writing and correspondence and later authorship. In addition, an analogy will be drawn between the ideas of Nezami and other authors and finally the application of the principles of authorship in some Persian texts would be analyzed.

Since long, philosophers, literary men, and theorists of different branches of knowledge have considered the concept of style and various stylistic schools, definitions, and theories have been presented in the last two centuries. Different factors have been named for the evolution of style from past to present. Little work, however, has been done on the restrictive factors of style and the factors resulting in unreal or hypocritical style. The restrictive factors of real style are classified into two groups:1) The ultra-linguistic factors consisting of social-historical grounds, the audience and encouragers, thoughts, self- censorship and the low literacy of poet or writer 2) Linguistic factors including commitment to literary traditions, disregard for the locality, and ancient-oriented approaches events.This study aims at presetting destructive and restrictive factors for the real style based on critical method and content analysis.

This study examines the distinguishing factors of the language of poetry from the standard language in the poetry of Hossein Monzavi, one of the founders of today's sonnets.Linguistically, the devices which play a role in creating poetry fall into two groups, auditioning rule and decreasing rule, under the heading "foregrounding language".In this research, various types of deviation, such as phonetic, dialectal, temporal, stylistic, writing and lexical, have been investigated and analyzed.