The Mastery of Speech

The book The Mastery of Speech is an introduction to understanding the textual world of Shahnameh and its functions, aiming to move beyond the traditional history-literature dichotomy that often dominates text interpretation, offering a new approach to engaging with Ferdowsi’s “speech.” In the first chapter, the author employs a hermeneutic approach to clarify the relationship between the text, history, and literature, or more broadly, reality and imagination, demonstrating that the imaginative-literary aspect is not unreal and that the literary narrative of Shahnameh leads to truth. The second chapter, relying on the same approach and analyzing the text and the narrative and metaphorical structure of Shahnameh, examines the method of narrating (imaginary reconstruction) the past in Shahnameh and elaborates on its cognitive and ethical significance.