a comparison of common stories of the mathnavi andattar's conference of birds

compared to other persian didactic literary works like the works of sanaei and attar, stories in the mathnavi have a unique position. a great number of the stories of the mathnavi were not created by mo'lavi himself; they have been presented in previous sources, including attar's manteggotteyr (conference of birds). relation between the manteghotteyr and the stories of mathnavi is over-textual, which implies every type of relation connecting text-b (hypertext) with text-a (hypotext). in this paper, the structure of common stories of two works has been compared with structural narratology to enlighten the aesthetical approach of the mathnavi in storytelling by signifying the similarities and differences of the two works. it is concluded that mo'lavi has used storytelling techniques much better than attar since he has applied a complex and indirect transformation of previous stories.