A research in Travel writing (Study of the reason for the prevalence of travel writing in Qajar Iran, its evolution and decline after the Constitutional Revolution)

Although Naser Khosrow wrote the first Persian travelogue in the fifth century AH, no other travelogue was written in Persian until the 12th century AH except for two travelogues. But from the time of Fath Ali Shah until the end of the Qajar period, the process of travel writing in Iran accelerated and more than thirty travelogues were written in Persian describing Farang and its developments. During the Pahlavi era, instead of describing the West, Iranian intellectuals wrote travelogues describing the countries ruled by the socialist system or traveling to the remote lands of Iran, and on the other hand, the number of Persian travelogues decreased to some extent.Which was gradually marginalized from the scene of contemporary Iranian literature and continued to exist in the form of memoirs. In this article, the author has tried to explain why travel writing is prevalent in a certain historical period, change its approach in other periods and finally marginalize it. It seems that the function of travelogues during the Qajar period, ie the introduction of the intellectual, social and political system of the West, has led to its prosperity in this period. With the realization of the constitutional political system and some other social developments in the Pahlavi era, as well as the influence of socialist and communist tendencies in this period, the attention of intellectuals instead of the West turned to the countries ruled by the communal system, so to test this system , Traveled to these countries and wrote travelogues describing them. On the other hand, with the formation of the discourse of westernization and return to the self, the attention of the Iranian intellectual community was focused on the remote inner regions of Iran and travelogues were written to describe these regions. In the old days, it gradually declined and continued to live more as a memoir.