ABSTRACT
Shahriar Mandanipour, a prominent Iranian author, published his first novel, Dil-i Dildādagī (The Courage of Love), in 1998. Along with making the transition from short stories to a novel, Mandanipour was trying out a higher level of complexity in The Courage of Love by further developing the form he had used in his short stories and showing the complex external and internal conflicts of four main characters of the novel: Roja, Davoud, Kakai, and Yahya. By creating such a conflicted atmosphere, Mandanipour creates a dialogic setting in which all the characters’ accents, in their Bakhtinian term, are heard through their interactions with each other and with the archetypical background of the novel. This chapter investigates the polyphonic and ambiguous aspects of The Courage of Love in terms of Mandanipour’s experimental approach.
