Religious Trend in Post-Revolutionary Persian Novel1

In contemporary fiction, a new trend in story writing emerged after revolution. Its agenda was to record the religious values as human virtues. This research aims at investigating the ups and downs and changes in this trend while the diversity and multiplicity of the writers and the works have also been considered. In this research, 15 stories of three different time periods including Islamic revolution, reconstruction and reforms have been chosen and analyzed in a targeted way to illustrate all the aspects of Iranian writers’ efforts in writing religious novels. In doing so, in order to analyze the texts and explain their relation to historical, social and political contexts, methods introduced in discourse analysis have been used with a focus on narrative components. An overview of novels in these three decades shows the general trends related to the main political and social discourses. In 1980’s, some first time novelists mostly consisted of sensational revolutionary young writers published their novels. Revolution, war and the related values were the main themes in these writers’ works, and in most of their works, religious insights have been affected by the dominant political discourse. In the second period, religious novels targeted more diverse themes and audiences, and tried to communicate their insights in a more diverse and novel ways. In the third period, the writers paid more serious attention to the artistic form for reflecting the themes which match the writers’ worldviews and approaches.