Iranian and Arab Nationalism in Persian Stories of the Iran-Iraq War

War story is one of the important genres in contemporary Persian literature. One of the motives in these stories is referring to some aspects of Iranian and Arab nationalism. In this research, various aspects of this motive are studied. In this research, the ideological aspects of the representation of narrators of the stories about the Iran-Iraq war in relation to Iranian nationalism (including the Pahlavi discourse) and Arab nationalism (including the Baath discourse) are investigated. For this purpose, articulation of nationalism or challenging it in a corpus including thirty thousand pages of fictional works about the war (including works that are classified as "sacred defense stories" and works that have a different approach) is examined qualitatively in the framework of critical discourse analysis. Studying these works clarifies the link between the identity of discourse participants (producer and consumer) and their representation and interpretation methods. Analyzing these works shows that works of the revolutionary authors challenge Iranian and Arab nationalism; constructing Islamic/Iranian opposition and supporting the Islamic side, opposing modernism and Westernism in Iranian nationalism (and the Pahlavi discourse) are the important aspects of challenging this discourse. In some other works, where the authors have an Islamic-Iranian identity and do not make the opposition between Iranian and Islamic identity, the Pahlavi discourse, which articulates extreme Iranian nationalism, is challenged in terms of moderate and minimal nationalism. In some cases, some signs of extreme Iranian nationalism are articulated in the revolutionary works. In some other works whose authors' identity includes aspects of cosmopolitanism, the extreme Iranian and Arab nationalistic values are mainly ignored and authors concentrate on cosmopolitan values or moderate and minimal nationalism.