A Sociological Study of Iranian Women’s Role in Fictional Literature in the Recent Two Decades

Fictional literature has experiencedan increasing and stunning growthof women writers in the past two decades. In terms of quality and quantity, theincrease was to the extent that nowadays women’s names are mentioned sometimeseven more than men’s amongthe distinguished writers ofcontemporary Iranianliterature. On the other hand, these authors have often chosen the novel astheir main literary form. From the sociological view of novel and of critics such asGeorge Lukacs, the growth of women in fiction writingsmake sense in the contextof social and cultural developments of contemporary Iran,finding ways to pass thesociety toward modernity. In fact in this paper we assume that this unprecedentedgrowth is due to the general conditions dominant over the intellectual and socialenvironment of Iran and the transition of the society from traditional to amodernone; and amongother important factors regarding modernity, in this paper individualityis considered as the main element whose formation and evolutionthrough thehistory of modernity in Iran, has eventually led to a phenomenon we face today,i.e. the dramatic growth of female writers. In other words, individuality or femaleindividuation is the factor that has moved its way inspite of various political, culturaland social changes, and brought along other results which led to the stunningemergence of women in writing.