Investigating ideological layers of style in the story of Amir Arsalan

Each language is formed in a specific cultural context. This enables the literary works to point out the cultural discourse, and especially the ideology of a society. Thereby the effect of cultural transformations of various generations and even different literary genres can be studied. The study lies in the field of stylistics and it is from the category of discourse analysis. The story of the Amir Arsalan is one of the most popular folk-romantic novels of Persian language. Like any other literary text, the story is not devoid of ideological views, and it well describes the language discourse, power and ideology of a certain era. Through exploration of the ideological layers and their social and historical backgrounds, this study suggests how this seemingly romantic story reflects cultural and ideological clues. The result of the research shows that the story of Amir Arsalan, despite the structure of romance, has been drafted with a religious-national ideological approach to explain the supremacy of Islam (Shi'i) to disbelief .The story has changed from a historical genre to romance-fiction genre over the course of time. It is this structure and reliance on the collective memory of the people, that enables the story to have a high impact on the society