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The Oriental culture, literature and myths have long been the focus of Orientalists and Western scholars. William Morris is a British poet who was interested in Persian poetry and literature. He was familiar with Persian culture and literature, and wrote “The Man Who Never Laughed Again” based on “The Black Dome” in Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Peykar. He imitated the character, atmosphere of the story, the symbols, the colors, the costumes and other elements of the story from Haft Peykar. Haft Peykar or Haft Gonbad is one of Nizami’s lyrical poems that symbolically portrays the spiritual transformation of King Bahram of Iran. Bahram proposed to marry seven princesses from seven countries, and made them the first ladies of the seven palaces. He was the guest of one of them every night to spend time and rejoice when he heard stories. Finally, at the end of the week, when he was the guest of the Black Dome, Dorsati the Persian princess told a story about the Persian culture that influenced Bahram. This research, like other researches, has examined the impact of Nizami’s “The Black Dome” on William Morris’ work through the analysis of the content of the texts. It is based on library studies. In conclusion, this research is going to prove that William Morris’ work in terms of structure and content, like a refreshing seedling, is originated under the shade of the thick tree of Haft Peykar, then it has borne fruit in European literature.

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Intertextuality is Mikhail Bakhtin’s evolved polyphonic theory based on which the literary texts of past and present are in dialogue with each other and no text is self-sufficient and devoid of its earlier texts. The intertextual feature of artworks and literary texts challenges their independence and makes the boundaries of their independence unstable. Drawing on this idea, the present study analyzes the short story “Mirza Yunos” from the short story collection Ayne va Se Dastane Digar by Sirus Shamisa. In addition to being a manifestation of the characteristics of postmodern era, I argue, the instability and suspension of boundaries among literary texts is a consolidating element for the ontological aspect of fictional atmosphere in the realm of fiction, through which the textuality of history/reality is realized. This study shows that the various inter-texts in a text can make it possible for the existing and non-existing experiences to be interwoven in a way that recognizing their limits becomes increasingly difficult. I also argue that literary texts are not just in dialogue with written texts, but the semantic and conceptual scope of the word “text” becomes wider and includes various new aspects. In fact, as different genres enter the fiction realm, one should speak of “inter-genre” concept and think of the fiction as its subcategory.