A Stylistic Analysis of Majdieh Treatise

Majdieh Treatise, written by Mirza Mohammad Khan Majdalmalek, is one of the first critical works of Persian prose in the Nasseri period. In line with the awakening movement of constitutional literature to enlighten the thoughts and reform the affairs, this work depicts the disorders of the era in the form of a stable prose, with a critical and humorous language. Many critics have spoken about the literary significance of this work, alongside its socio-historical values. The book's editor, Saeed Nafisi, has called it the greatest masterpiece of Persian prose of the thirteenth century. The main objective of this research has been to search for the excellent literary coordinates of this work and analyze its prominent linguistic and rhetorical features with a constructivist stylistic approach. In this article, the stylistic features of Majdieh's Treatise were examined by descriptive-analytical method, at three levels; linguistic, rhetorical and intellectual and the following results were obtained. At linguistic level, the use of Arabic words, combinations, pronouns, and morphological scales are dominant, which distances the text away from the simplicity of language and adds a variety of literary and artistic capabilities to it. The most important syntactic features of the work are the use of descriptive verbs and its predictive aspect with high level of certainty. At literary level, there is an extensive use of novel figures of speech such as pun, saj’, internal rhyme, leonine verse and parallelism, which create a strong inner verbal music as well as rhetorical effect in this work. Extensive use of novel figures of thought such as contradiction, allusion, congeries, and allegory, in addition to providing the author with the opportunity for reasoning, analogy and affidavit, makes the text more poetic and, in some cases, brings closer to technical prose. At rhetorical level, the use of metonymy and irony- is more artistic compared to other rhetorical tools, due to their effective role in humor. At intellectual level, the main discourse of the work is comprised of criticism for lack of justice, incompetency of government officials, criticism of the economic situation and governmental corruptions and the presentation of reform /ideal proposals in various political and social dimensions.