Auden and Shamlou's Subversive Discourses on Martyrdom and Militarism: A New Historicist study
Nasataran Bandehkhodaei

Abstract
With Stephen Greenblatt as its main proponent, and Michel Foucault as its main source of inspiration, new historicism emphasizes the historicity of literary texts as well as the texuality of history. It has always been remarked by the new historicists that history is a complex phenomenon, incorporating interacting discourses, and that literary texts are woven through with social forces. In this interaction, the new historicist critics often look for ways literary texts act subversively to divulge the lost or the repressed discourses. Taking off from such remarks, the researchers seek to show how the poems of Auden and Shamlou—the former being an English poet, and the latter an Iranian poet—are interrelated with the complex network of social discourses. As it happens, in their inter-textual relationship with these discourses, not only do these texts not recreate or support them, but they also construct an opposing discourse. In fact, since a number of Shamlou and Auden's poems have been situated in wartime, they refer the readers the subversive discourses about war.

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