Image and Reform: The First Modernist Iranians facing the Thought and Literature of Europe

Imagology is an approach to comparative literature and aims to study worship representations. The image given of the society viewed through descriptions by a viewer may well reflect the cultural differences and mismatches that exist between the two cultures. The first Iranian modernists, Akhondzadeh and his fellow travelers, among others, tried, by combining literary art and social criticism, to highlight this cultural gap and thus encourage their readers to accept alterity. To this end, they have created literary genres that best adapt to the representations of their society and those of the ideal society. In this article, with the aim of making an imagological analysis of the works of these authors while taking advantage of the theories and approaches of imagology we will study the stylistic and structural properties of the texts of Akhondzadeh and A Traveler tells. We will also analyze the reasons why these authors succeeded in transmitting their message and how they mentally prepared their readers to accept a cultural transposition.