The Connection between Literature and Miniature, Jāmī's Leyla and Majnun and a miniature by Muzaffar Ali as a case

Comparative literature has provided various methodologies in the process of its evolution and development. The American School of comparative literature, beside breaking the established limitations of the French School, has placed emphasis on the necessity of discovering the connection between literature and the other arts and human knowledge and consequently extracting and classifying the common rules governing literature. Following this point of view, the present study has, from a comparative perspective, compared part of Leyla and Majnun narrative by Nur ad-Dīn Abdurrahman Jāmī in Haft Orange Masnavi with a painting called "Qays First Glimpses at Layli" attributed to Muzaffar Ali, a follower of Tabriz Painting School. The present study is thought of as a practical example with the aim of correctly explaining the viewpoints of the American School of comparative literature. On the basis of this study, the time element, paratextuality, description, and signification are among the general principles in literature which can be extended and generalized over the other knowledge areas via the comparison of literature with the painting art. In the other section of this study, the implicit significations hidden in the folio have been extracted. Discovering the relationship and connection between literature and painting can double up a professional audience's artistic enjoyment rate and the watcher, while standing opposite the folio, can gain artistic enjoyment from the two arts. The study also indicates that a literary text, after having been transmitted to another significational area, inevitably loses some of its components or appears in a different form.