The ‘diachronic approach to narrative studies’ may take different directions, one of them being a typological research on narrative texts, and the other, a genealogical enquiry into the modern ways of storytelling as to see how they have historically originated from a certain group of folktales. Assuming, in the same vein, that some relics of Persian formulaic oral narration should have survived—through functional modification, or even obliteration— into the Iranian literary fiction, this article introduces just one instance of these Persian-folktale-specific formulae, drawn out from a bulk of more than 270 texts whose inscription dates back at least to 70 years ago. Then the question is whether the formula has completely vanished away, or simply alternated between a number of functions.

Keywords: metafiction, Persian folktales, Iranian literary fiction, formulaic narrative shift, metanarration

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