Reading the story of Rostam and Sohrab from the point of view of criticism of modern historicism

Literary criticism is the exploration of a text's semantic layers using theories and methodologies that are mostly drawn from other humanities disciplines. New Historicism, which Steven Greenblatt developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is one of these theories. Modern historicism holds that literature and history both have an impact on one another, in contrast to conventional historicism, which speaks of the one-sided influence of history on literature. In this study, we attempted to evaluate the tale of Rostam and Sohrab in relation to modern historicism, identify and analyze its discourses, and propose a novel interpretation from it. In this narrative, a variety of discourses have generally been depicted, and they develop the plot in conflict with another. These discourses include the Nirani discourse (Afrasiab), the official wrestling discourse (Rostam), the informal wrestling discourse (Sohrab), the women's discourse (Tahmina and Gerd Afrid), and the Shahriari discourse (Kikavos) (other Iranian and Nirani wrestlers).