Explaining the Status and Function of the Anti-Discourse in the Historical Novel Damgostaran or Enteghamkhahan-e Mazdak

Abstract

Studies on historical novels due to not paying attention to the origin of the text and parallel discourses consider the historical novel as the nostalgic return of Iranian society to the myth of the Golden Age and it has been explained with macro-narratives and concepts such as nationalism. This article has been done based on Damgostran and by the method of qualitative content analysis in the context of the application of critical discourse analysis. So by analyzing Damgostaran on several levels, another reading of this genre has been presented. In this research, based on the above story, the central meanings of the work have been identified as an independent text and these meanings have been transferred to the original context in order to determine the originality of the meaning in that context. After tracing this meaning in a historical course, it returned to the era of the creation of the work, and this time the transformed meaning has been evaluated in a new context and an intertextual-interdiscursive relationship. Finally, the relationship between the text and the prevailing discourses is explained. The result of Damgostran's study is that this is not a conservative work. Rather, it belongs to the most radical discourses of the author's time. In this reading, a seemingly mundane work and a dead story, along with other homogenous components, form a discourse that is more than anything else a cry of protest against the consolidation and expansion of the global capitalist system that at the end of the 19th century slowly spread the shadow of injustice and inequality on the thin body of the new world.

Keywords

• historical novel
• damgostaran
• abdolhossein sanatizadeh kermani
• active anti-discourse
• negative nostalgia
• discourse analysis