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Sociological criticism is one of the modern and efficient methods of the study of literary texts, and today it has a wide application in the analysis of modern literary geners, especially the contemporary Persian novel.                                 This article aims at the analysis and appreciation of the contemporary Persian novel and explores the historical, political, and sociological structure of the Iranian society reflected in some of these novels. The findings of this research show that:

1.Novel is the most complete genre that might respond positively to   modern sociological studies

2.The Persian novel can explain the structures of the Iranian society very well.

3.The more distance we take from the simple structure of the Iranian society in the constitutional age (i.e. , early nineteenth century), the age of the emergence of the first Persian novels, and move towards the more complicated and intricate contemporary society ,the structure of the Persian  novel becomes more complicated and the social themes become more varied and more complex.

4.The themes and subjects treated by the writers of the Persian novels shift from broad generalizations to specific details. This point, on one hand, shows the individualization of the Iranian contemporary man, who has a proper in the modern novel ,and the change of the structures of the society from the ancient simple ,primitive and heroic state to complicated and modern structures  on the other.

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Sayed Mohammad Reza Ishghi is considered one of the constitutional poets in Iran and a forerunner in the case of literary modernism. The concept of   literary modernism is closely related with romanticism and its expansion from constitutional literature onward. Ishghi is the most outstanding poet of romanticism in his contemporary time. While his romanticism enjoys lyric elements; it is more concerned with social and revolutionary issues. Referring to ups and downs in Ishghi' life and highlighting romantic aspects of his works, this article analyses some of his works including "Maryam's three painting". Also, the romantic features of his works in terms of form and content will be presented.

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Allegory is a term of long history, wide use and likely vagueness in literary criticism and Persian eloquence. The term is sometimes used as the synonym of symbol, parable, and anecdote. In this article, an attempt has been made to explore the eloquent author's definitions in both old and new literary criticism and Persian eloquence by studying the background of allegory in religious literature and myths. The nature, function and types of allegory will be explored as well. Finally, the differences between metaphor and symbol of allegorical domains will be discussed. 

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The following issues will be explored in this article:

Mohammad Taghi Bahar's attitude toward the important international developments including the first and second world war and the consequences of the 2 wars; the situations of Iran and some Asian and European governments in the 2 wars. Given the enormous effect of political pacts and agreements between Iran and other government on the cultural, social and political affairs of our country, the Bahar's reaction to these pacts and the political and military interference of foreign countries especially Russia, England and US are worth considering within a cultural and historical framework.

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Thinking of death is a characteristic of human's soul. Man is afraid of death and is after contrivances to overcome it to the extent that the appearance of Isfandiar, Garshasep, and other heroes in Iranian and non-Iranian myths are claimed to be the product of this phobia. The need to suppress the fear resulted in the appearance of priests, oracles, and fortune tellers. The simplest reaction to death is manifested in the form of resort to Taaviz (seeking refugee in God), Herz, Tamime. This article describes the types of Taaviz in Khaghani's poems especially the poems sung in memory of his 20 year old son. Furthermore, the qualities of the Taaviz will be discussed.

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Appolo in Egept and Sokhan in Iran were two influential literary journals in Arabic and Persian Literature , respectively. They are placed between classic and romantic poetry. This article aims at introducing these two journals and uncovers some resemblances between them. Appolo was the official organ of "Appolo Society" in Cairo and was edited by the great romantic poet, Abu Shady and Sokhan was published under the editorship of Parviz-e Natel-e Khanlary by some college graduates. The present author's account of the resemblances between these two journals zones at introducing a fresh atmosphere in poetry especially romanticism, improving allegoric and dramatic poetry, establishing modern aesthetics, adopting a temperate approach to European literature, and taking a nonpolitical position.  Finally, the paper briefs many letter men and poets in Arabic and Persian literature. 

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This article revisits 'brag' and 'bragging' in the battle field in Ferdowsi's Shahname. To this end, in the first section, the denotative and idiomatic meanings of brag and bragging are examined and their historical background in ancient Greek, Arab and Iranian as well as the literature of the fourth and fifth centuries are briefly illustrated. The second section aims at exploring Ferdowsi's artistry in dealing with the techniques of bragging in the battle field by Shahname's champions and presents an evaluation of functions and the rhetorical values of bragging as utilized in ferdowsi's story-telling discourse.

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This study explores dialogue, a dominant style in both traditional and contemporary poetry / prose  narrative literature, in Shahname as a classical  masterpiece. To this end, initially, the concept and terminology of dialogue is scrutinized from the viewpoint of narration and its position and functions are discussed. Then, a reasonably large number of various dialogues are extracted from Shahname and examined in terms of their different features, including their in/directness and the partners. Finally, to analyze the role of this literary element, a subset of the distinguished dialogues basically concerned with champions are analyzed further for their content and topic and how they correspond with the conditions and setting factors. It is concluded that the literary element under study is basically represented in the heroic section and the dominant theme is boastfulness.

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Unlike ancient rhetoricians who rejected ambiguity altogether, modern theorists consider it as a value. This article, initially, presents a historical survey as well as the modern approaches to ambiguity and highlights the modern aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and polysemy. After the early years of 20^th century, ambiguity was considered as the essential essence of literary texts by literary critics and theorists. Second, the article discusses the value of ambiguity in literary works and draws a borderline between difficulty and polysemy (i.e. pluralization and multiple meaning). Then, it introduces some kinds of ambiguity and elaborates on their distinct features. Meanwhile, this article pinpoints the basic deference between language and literature through emphasizing the value and function of ambiguity.  The main purpose of the article, then, is to emphasis that "ambiguity as inherent nature of literature" and stresses the principle saying: "the artistic value of a literary work and the secret of its eternality depend on the amount of its ambiguity". If one ignores the ambiguity in literary texts, he would lose its spirit and essential essence. Ambiguity causes an interaction between   reader and text and fosters the ability of meaning creation by readers.  Through persuading the readers to react to the content of text, ambiguity provides the opportunities for generations to engage in different dialogues with text across time and history.

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Due to the significance of heart in mystical poem, in general, and in Mathnavi Maanavi, in particular, this article attempts to investigate the position and status of heart and probe the challenging question as to which heart deserves accommodation of the position of the Real. To this end, initially, the lexical origin and behavior of "heart" as well as its reason of appellation is provided and discussed. Then, the unique characteristics of Celestial hearts are presented and the barriers between the heart and the Divine Kingdom are discussed.

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Simile is one of the main forms of imagination in any literature serving other forms of imagination because the principle in such images is of “the sameness” kind. Likewise, this figure is used in different forms of imagination such as metaphor, variety, expansion and freshness in the poems by Sepehri. This paper examines various views on the quantity and quality of his images, having or not having frames and classifies the allegories employed by him through reviewing a corpus of his well-known samples. The paper is based on different types of simile in terms of bases, sensibility and wisdom of the parties, variety of the parties, etc. in order to categorize the samples. Nevertheless, in his review of the samples, the author has not limited himself to the traditional views but has also studied the new European schools of thought. One way to recognize the ideas of poets and uncover the corners of their minds is to explore the images in their poems. Accordingly, the present research has tried to examine the underlying thoughts of the poet as well as his attitudes.

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Del (heart) is one of the recurrent themes in Nezami-e-Ganjavi’s Makhzan-al-asrar. This paper addresses the concept and its true nature as well as its ranks. One may hypothesize that the poet has his own technical interpretation of Del spreading all through his ideas and thoughts and reflected in various sections of the collection. To answer the research questions posed in this research, content analysis method was utilized

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This paper presents a new description of "Tabriz" in one verse of  Mathnavi, Volume 6. The story begins with the journey of a poor man (Darvish) to Tabriz working for a loan from an official. Molana composes the poem from the point of view of this man about "Tabriz" and its residents. The poem reads : God`s empyrean mercy awarded to "Tabriz", the heaven on the earth, and whole residents.  In this paper, attempts are made to examine this claim of Molana based on historical documents and religious scholars’ views through adopting a library investigation mode of research. Interpretations are based of direct meanings of words.

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This article makes a general research in the specific features of Shia’s kalam (speculative theology) in irfan’s (Islamic mysticism) views of Ali ibn Inayatullah Bastami, known by the nick-name Bayazid Thani (the Second), especially in his book Rawzat al-arifin. The author has been an arif (mystic) and muhaddith (erudite in Prophet’s traditions) who has lived in X-XI century from Hijra. His purpose for writing this tractate has been to clarify some aspects of monotheism, faith, irfan and the principles of the mystical Way. The article is an effort to give an answer to the following questions: first, how the author as a  sufi, in the perspective of Oneness of Existence, and a Shia’s muhaddith can explore the topics of Twelve Shia’s theology within the paradigm of irfan and deepen in this domain; second, is it convenient and acceptable to the mystical wisdom or not, as a principle, that a sufi can use kalam’s proofs and demonstrations, knowing the negative mystical attitude toward rational discussions and issues of kalam.

After considering the most important features of Shia’s kalam in the book Rawzat al-arifin and comparing them with the kalam’s themes, examined by the greatest Shia’s mutakallimun before the time of our author, we could make the conclusion that he has been Shia’s mutakallim and arif in the same time, dwelling on irfan to make an explanation of kalam’ s subtleties. And it could be said also that as his irfan is demonstrative (kalami), his kalam is mystical (irfani).

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Scary Tehran by Moshfegh Kashani is considered as a pioneering social novel in Iran.In this article, we have tried to examine this novel from the social science perspective in order to explain its semiotics and answer the question of what signs this novel implies and whether the symptoms are ideological. To this end, following some preliminary introduction of the science of semiotics, we have analyzed the manifestation of signs in this literary work. Our findings indicate that the author has efficiently benefited from using signs in order to portray social problems such as social class differences, bipolar social system, and injustice. Further, the author  highlights the ideological concept of the symptoms and signs and how they represent the contrasts between the rich and the poor of late Qajar Tehran.

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In contemporary Poetry, especially in Gheisar's poems, various political, social and economic factors are included. Moreover, the content of these poems is closely related to revolution, war, martyrdom, and the regret of being left from martyrs' convey. However, there is a pressing need to investigate literary factors from a formalistic and objective stand point. One of the formalistic aspects in analyzing poems and literary texts in general is foregrounding which includes deviation from norms and establishing norms. Deviation from norms, as a new perspective in literature and poetry, is among the most substantial aspects of contemporary Poetry. Putting These techniques into practice, the degree of a poet's success becomes clear in developing a deep sense of freshness, more coherence and systematization in a poem, as well as reinforcing the musical dimension and leaving deeper impression. This paper attempts to answer the question whether Gheisar as a poet and artist has indeed created a piece of art in his poems in terms of deviation from norms. If so, in what dimensions has he used this artistic technique more frequently?  A follow-up question is an evaluation of his work from this perspective. Since Gheisar's poems can be discussed adequately from this perspective, in terms of deviation form norms, their style, dialect, terminology, syntax, written format, semantics, temporal and phonetic aspects are also investigated.

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One of the new questions that should be studied and discussed in novel is the relationship between language and gender. In this paper, which is an interdisciplinary research, the researchers relying on sociolinguistic studies, especially Lykaf’s theory, intend to study the relationship between language and gender in Shabhaye Tehran and discuss the influence of the gender of the author of the novel on its language and the achievement of the novelist in introducing a language appropriate to the gender of the characters.For this purpose, the language of the male and female characters in the novel has been studied on the basis ofcertain variables, such as the use of standard language, imperative sentences, interrupted speeches, collaborative and competitive dialogues, and finally decisiveness and subjugation. The findings show that the language of the characters is influenced by the author's gender. The elements of feminine language have been repeated with a higher frequency and the author in many ways succeeded in creating a language appropriate to the gender of the characters. The deviation of some variables from linguistic standards indicates the feministic tendencies of the author.

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Linguistic combinations are referred to as a chain of words that associate with one another and form a semantic phrases, such as adjectival and noun. Innovation in this field is one of the main tasks of creative poetry. Shams's sonnets are of the prominent works of Persian literature and their composition is characterized by its stylistic features. In order to express his sublime and mystical thought, Molana has created hundreds of neologisms and used a variety of norms to widen the bottleneck of the vocabulary or to avoid duplicate words and combinations. Among his works, Shams's sonnets are great examples of the fusion of thoughts. In the texts of his sonnets, there are hundreds of fresh adjective phrases such as "Perverted Thought", "Fantasy Imagination", "Golden Excuses" or noun phrases like "Mobs of Fancy", " World of Colors and Smells", “Farm of Heart” that require analysis. Rumi's innovations are not limited to this and different types of new structures are found in his nominative, adjectival, adverbial and verbal phrases and combinations, but this article deals only with this type of innovation. The findings show that Rumi created new and exquisite allusions and metaphors in Farsi using these combinations. And in addition to empowering the language by avoiding the use of repetitive combinations and words, Molana has added to its appeal and has portrayed his inimitable ideas in the form of language.