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The French speakers’ acquaintance with Iranian culture and literature took place later than that of speakers of Latin and Greek. The history of French language should be distinguished from the history of French literature. The French language developed gradually from the 5^th century and after the independence from the Roman Empire. That is why the history of French literature was first realized as epic literature in the 12^th century corresponding with Crusades. French Christian priests who had an essential role in creating the French language and literature were familiar with Zoroaster via translated Greek or Latin history books. However, more generally, via Bible and Torah, they regarded ancient Iran as the savior of Jews and Jesus Christ. During the Crusades, Iran was constantly regarded as an Arab country. Parallel with movement of Christian priests in the Mongolian period and the Christians’ influence in the royal palace, Iran’s name became well-known. However, we should regard the influential translations as a production of Christians’ long residence and learning of Persian language during and after the Safavieh period. One may consider two significant periods in the reputation of the name of Iran: The18^th Century whose literary works embrace a collection of manuscripts influenced by translations, interpretations, and reproductions. These works were criticized from Renaissance to the end of the 17^th century, mostly by monarch messengers, especially Christian missioners, in the form of analytical dictionaries, oriental novels, dramatic subjects, fables and myths. These sources dramatically influenced the woks of such elites as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the authors of the Diderot encyclopedia who marked the thought crisis period of the Great French Revolution. Although the translations were considered as Platonic, paratextual, and racial due to lack of Persian literacy, they had a drastic effect on the intellectuality of the French society and resulted in the foundation of a significant field named Orientalism in the 19^th century. In this era, translation of Persian works was done by trained diplomatic agents in a more organized way. Its influence was realized not only in politics but also in the Romanticism school; specifically, in the works of Victor Hugo and other literary schools such as Symbolism and Surrealism. In ideology and anthropology, Gobineau, who was under the influence of Aryan race, provoked a number of argumentations which, in turn, led to racism in the 20^th century. 

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The necessity of using modern literary knowledge in evaluating the Quranic texts and the writings based on the Quranic teachings is clear and necessary for Muslim researchers in today's world. In this research, the structure of Joseph’s (pbuh) Tale in the translation of Tafsir-e-Tabari (the Persian translation of Tabari’s Commentary of the Quran) has been evaluated by using Propp’s morphology. To achieve a more appropriate conclusion, this tale has been divided into four stories and its characters and their functions have been critically analyzed in each story. The number of the characters and the manner of their functions clearly demonstrate the structure of this tale on the basis of Propp’s theory. The movements of three stories out of four in the mentioned tale have followed Propp’s sextuple movement pattern; only in the second story of this tale, a two cross-sectional movement is seen that is not adaptable to Propp’s movement patterns and is considered as a new movement. Propp in his ideas has considered the religious roots and his morphology theory has been very efficient in studying Joseph’s (pbuh) tale. Since Propp has paid attention to structures rather than superstructures and quantitative details, his ideas are also helpful in studying the other tales. Finally, the author suggests that all the Quranic tales can be evaluated from a structural perspective on the basis of Propp’s ideas to find out the fundamental structure of these tales.   

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Speech representation is one of the most important tools which is used by writers in writing narrative texts and specifically stories. Although direct and indirect speech, which are two speech representation categories, are familiar names in Persian language, speech representation has been neglected in Persian language. This article investigates and compares different speech representation categories used in Persian stories written before translation movement in Qajar era and stories written after this movement and assesses the frequency, functional and linguistic characteristics of each category. For this purpose, the Semino and Short’s model of speech representation (2004) which is based on Leech and Short’s model (1990) is used. The research data is elicited from 7 stories written before translation movement and other 7 stories written after this movement in equal volumes. Finally, we conclude that (free) direct speech is the most frequent category in the stories written before and after translation movement and this is because of the nature of this category in producing the effects of dramatization and vividness. Also, the high frequency of (free) direct speech in recent stories can be related to the key role of characters’ individuality in modern novels. Moreover, the use of (free) direct speech and narrator’s representation of speech acts as the speech representation categories have decreased during the time but the use of indirect speech and specifically free indirect speech have increased.

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The general discourse of Islamic Sufism is a sacred attitude that was formed in the context of religion, in response to other opposing discourses such as jurisprudence, scholastic theology, philosophy and asceticism. At the end of the second century A.H., the followers of the Sufi movement incorporated the alchemy of love in the ascetic copper. Unlike other intellectual and religious movements of Islamic culture and civilization that regarded  the text of the Qur'an as a text descended from heaven to earth in a dialectical movement between heaven and earth, they considered the Qur'an to be a text for the movement from earth to heaven, that is, the Sufi ascension. With this in mind, we witness various encounters of Sufism with conceptualizing prominent and frequent signs, especially the floating sign of “trust” in Sufi discourse as well as other works of Sufism including scholastic and intuitive prose texts. In this paper, using the descriptive-analytical method and the approach of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, we have demonstrated the metamorphoses of this floating sign in several scholastic Sufi texts in Persian and Arabic, and through this we have explained the interactions of these texts.
 

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The Persian translation of “The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan” by James Morier is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of Persian literature. Mirza Habib Esfahani translated this work into Persian from the French translation of the book. The fact that a translated work, through an intermediary translation, can meet such a reception by the readers in the literature of a language is considered one of the rare and exceptional cases. Since the publication of this work, researchers of language and literature, translation and other fields of humanities have studied its various aspects. However, so far, there has been no research that studies the reception of this translation by the Persian readers from a historical perspective. In this article, based on Jauss’s concept of “Horizon of Expectations” and using the descriptive-analytical method, the researcher has tried to investigate various aspects of the reception of this translation by the Persian readers before and after the Islamic Revolution through reviewing the works and examining the existing texts. To do so, from among the studies available on this work, which comprised about 50 Persian articles and books published since 1942, ten significant works (5 published before and 5 after the Islamic Revolution) were selected and the expectations within them were examined and analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. Next, the various themes of the receptions of the Persian translation that were discussed in these ten works were extracted and compared. The findings of the study indicated that during both periods of time, the Persian translation of “The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan” was of interest to the literary taste and in accordance with the expectations of the readers, including writers, critics, and researchers, and it still continues to be widely received by the readers, which has made this work enduring and popular.