Document Type : Original Article
Authors
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Guilan, Iran.
Abstract
Although nostalgia—in its various forms, including longing for one's homeland, the past, or childhood—occupies a prominent place in modern literature and the arts, it was largely absent from the premodern world. Its emergence as a distinct concept is closely tied to the transformation of temporal consciousness in modernity. This study explores the historical shifts in the perception and conceptualization of time that made nostalgia possible as a modern experience. Given the diversity of nostalgic forms, the discussion focuses specifically on childhood nostalgia, its relationship to changing conceptions of time, and its absence from classical Persian allegorical poetry. Allegorical poetry, with particular emphasis on Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, provides an especially revealing framework for examining how concepts are understood within a given intellectual and cultural tradition. Through his repeated use of childhood as an allegorical motif, Rumi illuminates the various meanings associated with childhood in the premodern Persian worldview. A comparative analysis of poetic examples drawn from Rumi's Masnavi and other works of classical Persian poetry alongside selections from contemporary Persian poetry demonstrates that the premodern understanding of childhood differs fundamentally from—and may even be considered the opposite of—the modern conception. Employing a qualitative research paradigm, this study adopts an inductive content analysis within a descriptive-analytical framework to investigate these conceptual differences.
Keywords
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