Contemporary narrative theory came to being with Russian Formalism and developed through the work of authors and critics such as Sheklovsky, Todorov, and Strauss. Relying on Saussure's linguistic theories, literary structuralism flourished in the 60s. Structural narratology started in 1928 with the publication of Vladimir Propp's Morphology of Fairy Tales. Propp, a Russian anthropologist, claimed that despite apparent differences, all stories follow similar actions and share similar characters. He believes there are fixed and changing elements in the stories. Names and traits may change, but the actions remain the same. Propp categorizes his findings in four formulas: fixed elements, 31 functions, and 7 spheres of action. This paper tries to reread Shahnameh's Bizhan and Manizheh from Propp's perspective to see if it complies with it or not. Finally, it concludes that it is compatible with the 31 functions, though Propp does not go beyond the surface structure and ignores key components such as motives, starting points, ethics, and religious considerations. Also some of the functions are not found in the story.

Structuralism and post-structuralism criticisms are scientific, novel methods of studying Persian stories through which the coherent structure which is intertwined in the story can be revealed. Binary oppositions are basic concepts which exist in structural and post-structural criticism. According to these theories, there are two major functions for the text that advance the story. These binary oppositions can be found in all parts of Masnavi. The authors tried, in this study, first to analyze the lexical meanings of binary oppositions and then to examine the binary oppositions in Masnavi.