From Interlecture to Intertextuality: Narratalogy of Ashura Heritage in the Fiction of Mahmud Dowlatabadi

Literary works have their own origins; each text, while being developed in mind or being jotted down on the paper, is necessarily influenced by relevant preceding texts. This has resulted in the emergence of new concepts such as intertextuality or interlecture in the area of New Criticism. In fiction, the more outstanding leading resources and themes are resorted to for the creation of new literary works. Ashura heritage, as one of these leading themes, is an inseparable part of every Iranian Muslim’s religious identity recurrently reflected in Iranian fiction. Literature, especially fiction, as a mirror of social beliefs and events has reflected the themes surrounding Ashura up to the point where a range of “Ashura Literature” has been created. Numerous elegies and lamentation poems have directly reflected Imam Hussein’s (AS) uprising and its concurrentevents. In contrast to poetry, fiction has the capacity to borrow and reflect those elements of Ashura events which are not easily reflected in poetry. A leading writer of the type, Dowlatabadi as a novelist has been influenced by the Ashura heritage in a more complicated manner. He has accomplished a unique literary creativity through a concurrent use of the various features of Ashura heritage and his personal experience in the area of religious lamentation (Ta’zieh). In this paper, we aims at investigating the way Ashura events have been represented in Dowlatabadi’s works, through a comparative perspective and with a focus on the theories of intertextuality and interlecture originated from Gérard Genette and Jean Bellemin-Noël.