Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی
Authors
1
PhD Candidate, Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran,
2
Professor, Faculty of Persian Language and Literature, Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
One of the most fruitful periods of literary criticism in the history of Persian literature is the era of Indian-style poetry, in which treatises were composed specifically on literary criticism. In some tazkiras and treatises on rhetoric, there are detailed scientific criticisms and opinions, which indicate the height of literary criticism in terms of quantity and quality. Especially in the Indian subcontinent, scholarly critics like Khan Arzu and Azad Bilgrami created valuable works in rhetoric and literary criticism. Khan Arzu authored independent treatises on literary criticism, but Bilgrami’s criticisms should be searched for in his tazkiras (especially Khizanah-i Amirah) and rhetorical treatise (Ghizlan ul-Hind). Azad Bilgrami has looked at Persian poems from different perspectives such as linguistics, rhetoric, prosody, and stylistics and has expressed pioneering opinions in these areas. Azad should be considered one of the prominent rhetoricians of the eighteenth century due to his original treatises in the field of rhetoric, Ghizlan ul-Hind and Subhat al-Marjan. Therefore, his rhetorical approach to literary criticism is of particular importance. In this paper, Azad’s rhetorical criticisms have been collected and explained, then his aesthetic viewpoints have been extracted, analyzed, and categorized through the criticisms. Most of his rhetorical perspectives aim to create semantic congruence and correlations, expand the association network of words, and increase their connection. His criteria for literary beauty include escaping from the constraints of the real world and distancing imagination from the limits of nature laws and the conventions of the mind. Azad considers “applicability by native speakers” to be one of the essential criteria for the correctness of unfamiliar language constructions and strange metaphors and similes. He also considers the expansion of the aspects of similarity to be the criteria of the excellence of similes. The beauty of poetry in his opinion is based on the three pillars of aesthetic astonishment, congruence, and objectivity.
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