Narrative Structure of Qur'anic Stories in English and Persian Adaptations[Latin Thesis]

Homa Ahmadloo

The Qur an is the Holy Book of Muslims. An important part of the Qur an is the story. Study of narrative structure of qur anic stories and their translations is very important. A most well-known story in the Holy Qur'an is the story of Joseph (PBUH). The present descriptive-analytical research was aimed at examining the narrative structure of the story of Joseph (PBUH) in chapter Joseph in the Holy Qur an, as well as that of the Persian and English adaptations. To this end, and on the basis of the theory of Genette (1980), two elements of the story, i.e., event and character, were investigated. The events were examined from three aspects: order, duration, and frequency and the characters were examined from three aspects: addition, omission, and change. The Freytag diagram for each of the stories was drawn. Then, the findings related to each of the adaptations were compared with those of the original story. The study indicated that, the narrative structure and speed of one of the adaptations (P7) were almost the same as the original story while those of the other adaptations differed drastically. It was also revealed that there existed certain differences between the adaptations aimed at and prepared for readers of different age ranges. The narrative speed was the highest in children's adaptations, and it decreased as the age of the readership increased. In adaptations for children, certain aspects of the characters were omitted while certain others were stressed. With the increase in the age of the intended readership, the changes in characters decreased. It was also found that those adaptations which were aimed at the same age range had remarkable similarities in the narrative structure.