A Comparative Study of Allegory in Attar's Conference of the Birds and Alfred de Musset's The Story of a White Blackbird

Abstract

The symbols constituting the allegorical stories of different nations have many similarities in many facet, which continuously depict the real world. The similarities among metaphorical, allegorical and mythical stories in the world literature paves tge way for researchers who are interested in studying and discovering these similarities taking a comparative approach and makes such a research seem necessary. In this article, Conference of the Birds, the outstanding work of Attar, the seventh-century poet and Sufi from Iran and the Story of a White Blackbird by Alfred de Musset, a famous romantic French writer and poet of the nineteenth century. Different kinds of birds constitute the characters and the main structure of these two works. This study tries to give definitions of allegory in literature and the symbol of bird, to make a comparative study of the allegories and the reasons for its use in the French Romantic School and in Persian mystical literature.

Keywords

• allegory
• attar
• musset
• search for identity
• mystical literature
• romanticism