Puns and Innuendos in Early Iranian Drama

With the birth of Russian formalism in the early decades of twentieth century, which primarily explicated the role of literariness in language and literature, a new scientific approach emerged that explored the literary devices in the formation of defamiliarization and meaning. Drawing from this approach, we will study the fledgling corpus of Iranian drama in the last century of the Qājār Period (1768–1925) in order to investigate how playwrights like Mirzā Fath ‘Ali Ākhundzāde (1812–1878), Mirzā Āqā Tabrizi (1833–1908), Ahmad Kamāl al-Vezāre Mahmudi (1875–1930), and Mo‘ayyed al-Mamālek Fekri-Ershād (1869–1916), among others, employed literary devices to create literariness and to amuse their reader/audience.