نشریه فرهنگ و ادبیات عامه
پیاپی 32 (خرداد و تیر 1399)

Persian folk culture and literature, largely oral literature, has been mostly forgotten due to the dominance of aristocratic literature, but what is left of it is also because of the same aristocratic literature, especially for the narrative works such as Faraj Ba’ad Az Sheddat. Through these works, we have access to unique experiences of folk culture. Such folk narrative prose texts are appropriate bases for examining the cultural reflections in various contexts, including issues related to women’s status. This study tries to employ a new approach on the ancient prose, and further show that the same narratives have been considered from the formalistic approach so far, but new points of view and perspective could be employed as well. To this aim, the critical discourse analysis approach based on the theory of Fairclough was applied on the sample text at three levels of description, interpretation, and explanation. This research seeks to demonstrate power of women and its cause. The study, focusing on the women's role, agency, and presence and engagement, shows that despite their minor significance, a woman is a symbol of courage in the aftermath of severity, while in the story, the woman, audacious and brave, rebukes against traditions and breaks taboos. As a result, it was concluded that women have an active and powerful role in this text, and their leading role as an agent in the formation of story is evident. Although there is an unequal power relation between men and women, reading between lines, it could be claimed that unlike aristocratic male-dominant discourse, women have sources of power as well. They react against the particular hegemony to achieve their specific goas. Finally, it was found that the agentive role of the women plays a key part in the formation of narrative and explanation of their sources of power.

One of the distinctive aspects of Iranian local cultures is the local poems that are composed and sung in the local dialect. Even though they are different from formal literature, these poems are well known among tribes. Long and nostalgic poems are a new phenomenon in local poetry which emerged in the second half of the 19th century in different Iranian tribes. These poems, which mostly reflect the pre-modern age of Pahlavi, are indicators of nostalgia and sad loneliness among local poets and Iranian tribes. In this article, the nostalgic aspects of 40 recognized poems are analyzed. This analysis shows that the return to infancy or nature is the major feature of nostalgia in such poems, and the local poets try to revive the collective memories of the tribe and their local identity by pinpointing the environment, cultures, games, tools, people, and places. Other aspects of nostalgia such as mythology or complaints of life are reflected relatively less in these poems. The representation of the aspects of Iranian local culture in this research demonstrates that these components, regardless of being different, have numerous similarities as well.

This study investigates fear in the Dehkhoda’s proverbs from a psychological point of view. To this end, it employs a method of inferential content analysis. The data concern all the Persian proverbs in Dehkhoda's four-volume book on proverbs. The findings show that, as in modern psychology, fear has positive and negative faces; this inconsistent attitude is also evident in Dehkhoda’s proverbs as well. In addition, the proverbs have not only addressed the concept of fear, but also the types of fear and their causes as well as the ways to overcome them in line with modern psychology. Thus, it is suggested to psychologists and counselors to use proverbs as a tool in pursuit of their goals, particularly so far as the behavioral changes are concerned.

Propp recognizes two initial situations in the morphology of Russian fairy tales: defect and evildoing; however, he considers both as original spontaneous situations. In this article, it is assumed that these patterns are significant and also the deficiency has always its origin in evildoing, but this is not an independent condition in the Iranian thought. To discover the meaning of these patterns, the fairy tales and Iranian myths as well as the national epics have been comparatively studied. The analytical method is structuralism and diachronic. The results of the study show that the myths of creation have two models, both based on the struggle and conflict of two opposing forces; however, one is creative and the other is destructive. In the first, the creator needs an element based on which the material universe is made or dependent on. This model appears in the magical legends as a defect situation. In the second one, the creator creates the universe in an ideal situation, but it can be invaded by the devastating forces and exit from its ideal situation. This pattern appears in the magical legends as the evildoing situation.

The ritual of "The King of the Sacrificed Camel" is one of the rituals about which various reports have been mentioned in the historical sources of Qajar era. In this ritual, a man who looks like the king, gets on a camel in Eid al-Adha. But the camel is sacrificed, the man falls down, and loses his superficial kingdom in severe humiliation. However, the study attempts to seek why the government allowed a man similar to the kind to be humiliated? And why this ritual is held in Eid al-Adha? The assumption is that the rite follows the rites of "Temporary Kingdoms" that were held from the ancient ages to recent eras in different territories. The people of these territories believed that the weakness or illness of the king caused drought, epidemic, and famine. So, they had to kill the king before the indications of weakness unfold and his ghost could be transferred to his successor in full health. However, after a while, killing the king converted to the killing of a man similar to the king, and then killing of this man was converted to his punishment and humiliation, though in some cultures an animal was sacrificed instead of him. The ritual of "The King of the Sacrificed Camel" contains both the humiliation of the temporary king and the sacrifice of an animal. The similarity of animal sacrifice in this ritual and Eid al-Adha helped the organizers to use the legitimacy of Eid al-Adha to continue this ritual. The study employs the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.

One of the most common issues among people is the belief in the good influence of some days, and the bad influence of the other days. Iranians have described some days of the year as days of good influence and some days of the year as days of bad influence. The belief in good and bad influence of a weekday is rooted in Mithraist themes in the tradition of which seven planets have a special sanctity, and gods have a very effective force in the fate of the universe and human. Studying the proverbs and folklore beliefs of Birjand inhabitants on this subject, this article attempts to reflect the ancient beliefs of good and bad influence of the days among the people of the region, and explore, as far as possible, the reasons for these beliefs. One of the beliefs of the inhabitants of the region is the belief in the bad influence of the Saturdays, and Wednesday nights which are rooted in ancient astrological beliefs. The method of the study is descriptive.

Folk tales were made popular among people in Qajar era. The advent of lithography in this period contributed greatly to the dissemination and expansion of these stories, especially the illustrated lithographs that made stories more visually appealing to people. The story of the Noosh Afarin GoharTaj is a proverbial folk tale from the Qajar period which depicts Prince Abraham's love, King of China's son, for Prince GoharTaj who is the Prince of Damascus. The author and timing of this folk tale are unknown. However, numerous lithographs of GoharTaj's story show its popularity. Given the importance of this story for the public, the present study examines one of the most important lithographs of this story, the first one, dated back to 1847 and kept at the Lynch National Academy in Rome. This edition is illustrated by two illustrations by the most prominent illustrator of lithography books, Mirza Ali Gholi Khoi in 57 paintings. This study examines the popular story and the importance of lithography in promoting this story. The main part of the article is devoted to analyzing the illustrations of this edition from the perspective of iconography, demonstrating imaginary and mythical creatures, and drawing scenes of martial arts and martyrdom. The results of the research show that the illustrator has been trying to portray the paintings in a way that is popular and appropriate to the needs of his age.

Nuh Manzar is one of the lesser-known educational narratives and the only parody of Nizami’s Haft Peykar in Persian literature that was kept unedited and unpublished till recently. The present article attempts to criticize the fictional motives of Nuh Manzar and propose a rather comprehensive description of its characteristics.  This research is basically in two parts. In the first section, the origin, time and place of the compilation, the narrator, reasons for its title, the subject and theme, the style, the expression, and the literary genre are identified. In the second part, for the qualitative analysis of the subject, the main motives of Nuh Manzar are criticized in three parts: influence of Shahnameh, Ayyari, and lyric motives

Qahramān-nāmah (or killer hero, or The Tales of Heroes) is a work by AbūṬāhir Ṭarṭūsī, a prolific author in the sixth century. This story is one of the popular folklore, reflecting the mythological reign of Houshang Shah and the courage of his warriors. The main characters in this story are Qahraman, Houshang Shah, Gardankeshan, Sarv Kharaman, and Bahram Jebeli. There are several versions of the Qahramān-nāmah in Persian, Turkish, Uzbek, and Kurdish, but so far, except a few low quality and inappropriate stone prints, no critical correction has been made of this work. This article attempts analyze the existing version of the Qahramān-nāmah, some of the stylistic features of the National Library version (the basic version), and the main character of the story, the Qahraman.

Folk literature, or oral literature, is the forerunner of the written literature. Its orators were pure and reliable people who were not much literature. These folklores stayed with us through their transfer between generations. Part of the folk and oral literature is the "wedding songs" labelled differently in various parts of the country. In Fasa county, this type of literature is known as "Astunk or Wastunak". The present article examines the syntactic structure of this type of oral literature in terms of the type and components of the sentences in popular culture. To this aim, through field study and interview with older and preferably illiterate women, 127 Wastunaks from the folk culture of Fasa were collected and transcribed. They were, then, analyzed syntactically (type and components of the sentence). The data was fed into SPSS 25. The results show that the frequency of the simple sentences is more than the compound ones and in most compound sentences, the subordinates are omitted for the rhythm of the poems. Finally, the three-part and four-part sentences had the highest and lowest frequencies in the Wastunak, respectively.