A Critical Analysis of the Economic Discourse in Khaqani Shirvani’s Poems

Literary works are the carriers of many regulations, values, norms, beliefs, structures and existential, cultural, and social aspects of their time. Many of the social and cultural realities of past centuries embedded within the extant literary works of those centuries can be identified and followed through. The critical approach in discourse analysis of literary texts provides a more precise knowledge of different cultural and social manifestations, life aspects, and people’s intellectual systems of the society of the authors of these works. The issue of economy is among social and cultural structures that has been less attended to in literary researches. The study of economic discourse in literary texts can also reveal other social, cultural, and intellectual discourses governing the temporal context of creating these works. This article deals with the critical analysis of economic discourse of the poems of Khaqani Shirvani. The goal is that following this approach to study the influence of this type of economic thought and the resulting culture on the linguistic, aesthetic, and intellectual structure manifested in Khaqani’s poetry and also to find out the reason why such a specific economic culture was dominant at that time. The result of this study indicates that the discourse of social hierarchy and luxury was dominant then and along with the power discourse resulting from wealth it had been naturalized and institutionalized in the economic culture of the time.