"Investigation of metalepsis in the Isfahan school manuscript illustrations based on Karin Kukkonen's model" (A case study of selected works of Reza Abbasi)

Isfahan school is one of the leading schools of manuscript illustrations in the Safavid era. These manuscript illustrations reflect many narratives, including literary, mystical, historical, political, and so on. Metalepsis, as a special type of narrative, causes transgression between levels of narrative. This feature can be explored in many works of art, including manuscript illustrations. Around the world, especially in Europe, narratologists are trying to study the historical developments of metalepsis to better understand it by identifying how it appeared and examining its changes over time, thus providing more complete models. Although the properties of metalepsis have been considered in the postmodern situation, extensive research on it in the ancient cultures of the world shows that the use of this method in literature and art has a long history. Some of the manuscript illustrations of the Isfahan school, by drawing narrative levels, show obvious transgressions of the created boundaries. In these manuscript illustrations, narrative levels are demarcated and fictional worlds are intertwined while being separated through frames. Analysis of metalepsis in Iranian manuscript illustrations that have a long history can further confirm this claim. No research has been observed in this field so far and the present research has been done with the understanding of the importance and necessity of filling the existing scientific gap in this field. This article seeks to discover the characteristics of metalepsis in the Safavid period manuscript illustrations with a fundamental purpose. The method of this research is qualitative with a descriptive-analytical approach and based on collecting information from library sources and visual archives. It is worth mentioning that unrest, encouragement, and deviation from specific frameworks in Reza Abbasi's manuscript illustrations break the defined boundaries of a narrative world. In some of his manuscript illustrations, Reza Abbasi mixes narrative levels and violates the certainty of borders. Therefore, three illustrations by Reza Abbasi with the names "Rustam kills the elephant", "Tahmuras defeats the demon army" and "Golgasht (Picnic with a nobleman)" have been selected based on the purposeful selection of the desired items and based on the presented theoretical framework. The result shows that the selected manuscript illustrations from the Isfahan school create three levels of narrative by using the mise en abyme technique and have rhetorical and ontological metalepsis in different movements. In the first manuscript illustration, "Rustam kills the elephant" and in the second manuscript illustration, "Tahmuras defeats the demon army", the presence of verses in the inner frame creates rhetorical metalepsis. On the other hand, because the texts from the world of the painter have been applied to the world of fiction, so they can be considered as descending rhetorical metalepsis. In all three illustrations, elements such as two women in the illustration of Golgasht, tree branches, clouds, etc. have penetrated from the inner frame (lower level) to the outer frame (higher level), which creates ascending ontological metalepsis. In the first and second manuscript illustrations, the shift from another fictional world to the inner frame fictional world forms a horizontal (intertextual) ontological metalepsis.