Classification of Courtship Types in Persian Love Poems

Document Type : پژوهشی اصیل

Authors
1 Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature Education, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran.
2 Master of Arts in Persian Language and Literature, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
One of the most important types of lyric poetry in the Persian literary tradition is the romantic system. Romantic stories, as stories that have a similar narrative context, generally have similar themes and elements. These narratives are rooted in the dynamics between two principal poles namely, the lover and the beloved and the analysis of the interactions between these two dimensions provides an appropriate tool for examining their narrative structure. In this context, the foundational action of the lover, which typically occurs upon the first encounter with the beloved, marks the initiation of a process that may be regarded as the central complication of the narrative—a gesture that, by establishing the desire for union, propels the subsequent events of the story. Within such a process, the act of “desiring the Other” is not merely a stage of human interaction, but rather emerges as a narrative knot endowed with semantic weight and functional significance. This initial act serves to fix the positions of the lover and 
the beloved within the narrative system: the lover is transformed into the agent in pursuit of union, and the beloved into the desired object. By relying on morphological and structuralist approaches, one can recognize and analyze this key stage within romantic narratives. In the present study, after presenting a new model of the structure of poetic love narratives in Persian literature, by selecting thirty relationships from these poetic systems, one of the most important stages of these relationships, namely the stage of the lover's request for the beloved, has been examined in terms of the motive for the request, the form of the request, the nature of the request, and the types of requests for response.
Keywords

Subjects


Baldick, C. (2001). The Concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms. Oxford University Press.
Childs, P., & Roger, F. (2006). The Routledge dictionary of literary terms. Routledge.
Fakhroddin Asad Gorgani. (2016). Vīs o Rāmīn (edited by M. Rowshan). Sedaye Moaṣer.
Ferdowsi, A. (1990). Shahnameh (edited by J. Khaleghi Motlagh). California & New York.
Frye, N. (1976). The secular scripture: A study of the structure of romance (translated by H. Rahnama). Hermes.
Jafari Jazi, M. (1999). The course of romanticism in Europe. Markaz.
Khwaju Kermani, K. (1940). Sam-nameh (edited by A. Benshahi) Bombay.
Mirhashemi, M. (2018). Ancient romantic poems: From the beginning to the sixth century. Cheshme. (In Persian)
Nezami Ganjavi, J. (1997). Leyli and Majnun (edited by H. Vahid Dastgerdi). Ghoghnoos. (In Persian)
Nezami Ganjavi, J. (1999). Khosrow and Shirin (edited by H. Vahid Dastgerdi). Ghoghnoos. (In Persian)
Payandeh, H. (2022). Theory and literary criticism: An interdisciplinary textbook (Vol. 1). SAMT.
Propp, V. (1989). Morphology of the folktale (translated by M. Kashigar). Ruz.
Safari, J., & Hoseini, M. (2009). The image of Shapur in the poem Khosrow and Shirin. Persian Language and Literature, New Series, 26(23), 203-231.
Scholes, R. (2004). Introduction to structuralism in literature (translated by F. Taheri). Agah.
Vaezzade, A. (2016). The morphology and typology of Persian love stories, 9(34), pp. 157-189. (In Persian)
Zolfaghari, H. (2013). Classification of Persian romantic poems. History of Literature, 2(5). pp. 77-90. (In Persian)
Zolfaghari, H. (2020). One hundred Persian romantic poems. Cheshmeh.