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H Dabiran.PH.D
A.Tasnimi
 
Abstract:
In the last years of Teimorian’s dynasty, when Soltan Hossein Baqera earned kingdom, Harrat became a scientific and cultural center; and actually a major place for several writers and scholars. Harrat’s court earned dignity and grandeur through the presence of Amir Alishir Navayi; the wise and literary minister of the time.
Molana Kamal-Edin Hossein Vaez Kashefi was one of the figures who proved his abilities during this era and created great works.
This prolific scientist has written books in a variety of fields; whereas Rozat-ol-Shohada’e is one of them. This book depicts the great Islamic event of Karbala (which led to the martyrdom of Imam Hossein) through a literary narrative manner.
This essay reviews Kashefi’s works and manners, while Rozat-ol-Shohada’e is also surveyed from a literary point of view regarding the literary elements as well as the innovations and the originalities in fictional narrative prose.
 
 

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Haft Keshvar is a narrative fiction by Heravi that includes an introduction, seven resting places, seven countries, and six journeys through some countries. The author discusses human virtues in the introduction and elaborates on politics, rulers, and their courts to reveal historical agendas of the time.  It is a 10^th century AH masterpiece that embeds ethics and politics in a literary narrative. The present study is a structural analysis of Haft Keshvar that examines its plot, characterization, and allusions. In other words, it aims at extracting components of the story to see how they are structurally bound to each other. Our results show that stories mostly encourage intellectualism and rationalism. Moreover, the plot is resolved either by a wise man or character actions at the end of the story. Results also show that, despite their trivial approaches and settings, all the stories follow a certain integrated philosophy that form a certain mindset. All the stories are close-ended.
Background
The Anthology of Persian Literature Volume 5 includes an entity on Fakhri Heravi’s Haft Keshvar (Safa, 1991). Moreover, Zekavati briefly recounts some tales and characters from different locations (Zekavati, 2008). Afshar reports on the first and second editions of the book (2010). Asadi (2017) compares the linguistic, rhetorical, and intellectual characteristics of Haft Keshvar and Mahboobalghalb. However, the study by Kadivar et al. (2020) is the closest to our analysis.
Aims
The present study examines narrative elements, structure, and the correlation between them in Heravi’s Haft Keshvar. In simple words, it seeks to explore the elements employed by Heravi in developing the stories in Haft Keshvar.
Discussion
Heravi (2016) rewrites tales of other writers and adopts the themes related to the tricksters to achieve didactic goals. The basic ground on which tales in Haft Keshvar rely on is organized and simplistic. Despite their weaknesses, they all have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Most of the tales have a closed circuit of plot schemes that follow a linear timeline.
Characterization is highly important in Haft Keshvar. Characters are mostly static:

1. Foil characters.
2. Opposite characters who share the physical and perspective similarities and serve to transfer the author’s ideas.
3. Ambiguous characters that are deployed solely to drive the story.

Haft Keshvar is a classical and didactic work where human function is depicted through opposing forces. Dialogue, in the form of questions or argumentations between major characters, are the most frequent narrative elements. They appear as monologues or argumentations. In fact, the dialogue contributes to the construction of events and helps to form individual identities through conflicts, expressions, attitudes, and interests. Fairclough defines dialogues as systematic development of themes that speak for themselves (Fairclough, 2000).
Time is naively ambiguous. A span of 30 days is set for the character to visit seven countries, and the other times are only for the main event to be developed. Setting of the stories are mostly realistic and only 25% of the story is fantasy. This indicates the fact that the author intends to validate the events. We should bear in mind that the characters do not need to be taken from real life, and they only need to be realistic and believable (Zigler, 1989).
Since Haft Keshvar is didactic, the tone and atmosphere are serious and in line with the overall theme of the story.
A close analysis of the narratives in the story reveals 8 cases of third-person point of view. In the remaining 46 cases, a character from the story narrates the events. However, the third-person point of view is dominant.
All the stories begin with an introduction to the setting of the events and characters to set the action of the story. Everything is logically presented and the reader is not bewildered. All the stories have closed endings.
Travelogues are either realistic, in which the author reports his own observations, or imaginary in which the author uses his own subjective perception (Razmjou, 2003, p. 212). Afshar and Afshary called this work Ibn Torab’s travel book, asserting its value as a travelogue.
Conclusion
Our findings show that the story follows a linear report. Nevertheless, there is an artificial rendering of events that give a closed characteristic to the work. All the tales have a beginning, middle, and ending ample with emotional and physical conflicts. Resolution of the events is mostly given by a wise man and characters’ actions. Characters are dramatically developed and named based on the ethics of the story. Dialogue is the basic tool to drive the stories. The book is a travelogue that reports the main character’s journey to seven different countries.
References
Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. Longman.
Fakhri Heravy, M. (2015). Haft Keshavar. Nashr Cheshmeh.
Razmjou, H. (2003). Literary genres in Persian literature. University of Mashhad Publication.
Scoles, R. (1974). Structuralism in literature: an introduction. Yale University Press.
Ziegler, I. (1968). Creative writing: Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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Abstract
Nizami's lyrical Manzumeh of Haft Peykar is a very coherent work in which extensive semantic relations and semiotic proportions are quite noticeable. Studying Nizami’s narratives in Haft Peykar led the authors to realize that there is a structural and semantic similarity between the micro-narrative of the King of the Black-clads and the macro-narrative of Bahram Gor in the whole Manzumeh of Haft Peykar. Therefore, in this study, the narrative discourse of these two characters was examined, analyzed and compared. The analysis has showed that both Bahram Gor and the King of the Black-clads were influenced by a grand conceptual metaphor that can be considered as a form of avarice; both characters take great actions in order to achieve their desires. These two actors also experience internal changes in their course of actions to achieve their desires through an unwanted and involuntary process. They do not behave in the same way in exploiting the experience and the guidance they gain along the way, so a different fate befalls them. After ascending to the land of the supreme or the land of the goddess, the King of the Black-clads is condemned to fall due to violating taboos and deviating from the norms, while Bahram Gor, by using the guidelines and gaining awareness, is blessed with a travel to a spiritual journey and ascension to the world of meaning.
Extended Abstract 
Nizami Ganjavi devoted particular attention to the fundamental relation between structure and content which, in addition to increasing the aesthetic aspect, has increased the inductive power of his literary works. Haft Peykar reflects this fundamental order and relation between structure and content more than any other Nizami’s Manzumeh (poems); a poem that contains sub-poems. Each of these poems is a coherent set that is fundamentally related to the other sets and to the entire body of Haft Peykar. In this Manzumeh, all elements of the story, including the colors, the names of the days of the week, the names of mythical people, places and creatures serve to explain Nizami's wise ideas in a systematic structure. The authors of this study discovered a conceptual and meaningful relation between the two characters of Bahram Gor and the King of the Black-clads by examining the linguistic and structural signs of this poem. While the structural relationship of the stories of these two characters is a whole-part; in the first dome, Bahram Gor is the listener of the King of the Black-clads story. Therefore, the authors have conducted this research with the aim of examining the structural and semantic relations between the narrations regarding these two characters. In this study, after presenting the theoretical framework and a summary of the narrative, with a semantic approach, the narrations of Bahram in Haft Peykar and the King of Black-clads are assessed in the first dome and then analyzed and compared with regard to the type of narrative discourse and the changes that have taken place in the characters. The theoretical framework of this research is based on a narrative discourse system. Each narrative discourse system consists of three main elements: “action”, “actor” and “object” and some sub-elements including “actor”, “actionable” and “active”. In this discourse system, before the formation of any action processes, a kind of defect or value crisis is felt and the actor acquiring this value object (a valuable goal that the actor performs his action to maintain or achieve it) begins its active activity. In this way, some issues and people are active helpers of actor, and some obstacles and problems may appear in his way. Eventually, depending on how the actor acts and behaves, this action ends successfully or unsuccessfully, which is called “the result of the action”.
The macro-narrative of Haft Peykar is that Bahram, after his victory over Khaqan (Khan) of Chin (China), remembers the image of the seven princesses he had seen in Khovarnagh, and after proposing them, he brought them to his court and built seven palaces for them. Every day, Bahram becomes the guest of one of the princesses in a dome which is compatible with that day and also in a dress that is the same color as that dome, and hears an instructive story. On Saturday, he hears the story of the Black King from the Lady of India. A king who gets information from the city of Madhushan (a city where all its people are dressed in black) by a traveler and travels to this city to discover the cause of wearing black. In that city, he goes to a garden in the Eden by a butcher's guides. In the Eden Garden, the king enjoys unparalleled pleasures after meeting Torktaz, the supreme lady of that land, and he enjoys every blessing except the possession of Torktaz; but finally, he loses his control and, after thirty days, tries to encroach on her privacy, and consequently is expelled from the Garden of Eden. So he returns to his hometown in regret and in black. After hearing the narrations of the women of other domes, Bahram leaves the seventh dome while he is no longer motivated by material things and worldly affairs and is more in search of spirituality. Therefore, he entrusts the affairs of the country to his children and relatives. One day, while hunting, he enters a cave looking for a zebra and disappears forever. As can be seen, the main characters of both stories start an action to acquire their valuable objects and achieve a result according to the path they choose to reach the object. In fact, the action of the King of Black-clads and the changes he experiences are consistent with Bahram Gor's actions in the macro-narrative of the Haft Peykar poem. Thus, both have great and far-reaching desires, and both are greedy and steadfast in fulfilling their desires; but they take different paths, and in the end, one leads to defeat and the other to victory. These two actors, in addition to their activities to achieve their goals, experience some internal changes through an unwanted process; The King of Black-clads travels from India to China in search of the cause of the stranger's blackness; but he inadvertently embarks on a spiritual journey and ascends to a higher land (the land of Torktaz), where he experiences companionship with the Goddess (Torktaz); but because of the strength of his carnal desires, he loses patience and perseverance, and eventually his taboo-breaking acts causes him to fall and be expelled from the Eden. Achieving self-awareness as well as mourning the descent from the land of the goddess are among the spiritual transformations of the King of Black-clads. Bahram Gor's goal is to build the seven-dome and marry the world's seven top ladies; but women's narratives play an important role in the spiritual transformation of Bahram. In fact, his journeys in the domes are journeys from ignorance to wisdom and consciousness. The temporary residence of Bahram in these domes is a symbol of the temporary residence of man in this world to gain experiences and reach self-awareness. This self-awareness culminates with Bahram's arrival to the cave; because his disappearance in the cave is a sign of his spiritual perfection (annihilation).
The color black in these two narratives is one of the linguistic signs that properly reflects the spiritual and inner changes of the characters. The king's blackness after his descent from the land of Torktaz is a sign of mourning and Bahram's blackness in the same dome is a sign of his ignorance that he gradually becomes aware of the process and finally leaves the last white dome. Black in the back of the narrative scene signifies Bahram's going to the cave, for which various interpretations can be considered; the darkness of the cave can be interpreted as death and annihilation, immortality (like Kay Khosrow and Khezr), being in the first stage of a new journey and being unaware of it or reaching a sublime position. Thus, the micro-narrative of the King of Black-clads and the macro-narrative of Haft Peykar have a similar structure in terms of narrative discourse.