Drought stress is one of the most important environmental factors which can limit the lentil production. To evaluate the effect of drought stress at flowering and pod filling stages on growth indices of lentil cultivar Kimiya (a new high yielding lentil cultivar for moderate cold and semi warm climate of Iran), an experiment was conducted at the research greenhouse of Higher Educational Complex of Saravan in completely randomized design with four replications. The drought stress was applied by withholding irrigation until the soil moisture reached to 20% of field capacity at stages of flowering and pod filling. In this experiment, we measured grain yield per plant, growth indices including plant leaf area (PLA), relative growth rate (RGR), plant growth rate (PGR), and net assimilation rate (NAR). Results showed that the flowering stage in lentil plant is more sensitive to drought as exhibited significant decline in PLA, RGR, PGR and NAR. PGR declined at the end of growing season when vegetative growth stop, senescence of leaves, the reduction of NAR, and the allocation of assimilate to the seeds.

Employing semiology to study the academy award-winning director, Asghar Farhadi’s oeuvre up to 2016, this paper wishes to scrutinize his depicted society through the lens of feminism. His female characters’ lifestyle and their way of thinking show they always feel uneasy in Farhadi’s depicted society. It defines woman the same as what other patriarchal societies do, an object in need of protection. In this undesirable condition, women are expected to back their sisters up; however, the opposite is true about nearly all female characters in Farhadi’s cinema. They usually live while denying each other as a sort of defense mechanism, and after Farhadi’s famous accidents, there is always one or more female characters putting the blame on the female victim of the accident, technically speaking, referred to as victim-blaming. This paper wants to seek a psychological answer for this unusual behavior. In this regard, seven movies have been chosen including: Dancing in the Dust (2003), Beautiful City (2004), Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011), The Past (2013), and The Salesman (2016).

Mysticism, religion and mankind’s relationship with an all-absolute deity has been a prominent part of the human experience throughout history. Poets such as Emerson and Rumi were similarly concerned with this question in creating their works. Although Rumi’s thought stems from the Quran and Emerson’s manifestation of Nature takes roots in the ancient eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, their works seem to share some explicit characteristics. Rumi (1207-1273) lived most of his life in Konya and Khorasan and Emerson (1803-1882) lived in America, but their immense geographic and temporal distances did not surpass their analogous attitudes as mystics. The biggest and the most obvious affinity between these mystic thoughts is believing in Monism as a spiritual practice. Although Emerson read and was influenced by classical Persian poetry of Hafiz and Sa’di, there is no evidence suggesting that he was familiar with Rumi’s poetry. Moreover, thematic analogies between Rumi’s Masnavi and Emerson’s essay on Nature result in a shared ideology which includes themes varying from monism, kashf or unveiling, attitudes towards language and the uninitiated. These concepts, observed in both works, point us toward the realization of universal features of mysticism.

Love has always shone as one of the major themes in literature. A great number of writers and poets have enriched their works with it and created memorable stories. However, not many have delved into the very nature of love itself to see what it really is and where it comes from. Hence, the present essay aims to stay away from the typical analysis of love and will instead focus solely on the nature of this immeasurable force through a comparative view on Emerson and Attar’s thoughts on the concept. To gain an understanding of their spiritual thoughts, the research focuses on comparing and contrasting Emerson’s essays with Attar’s The Conference of the Birds. The study is descriptive-analytical in nature and follows the American school of comparative literature. Through the analysis it is revealed that the two literary figures share many similar thoughts. To both of them beauty and love are considered the source of the universe. Furthermore, in their views true love leads to self-knowledge. The difference between the two is shown to be that Emerson has a more humanistic approach towards love, whereas Attar has a more mystically divine one. In the end, Attar’s influence on Emerson is identified as well.

Along history, sociology and literature have formed various associations with each other. From the sociology of literature that has considered literature as a social production to the usages of sociological perspectives as literary theories or the usage of literature as illustration of sociological abstract notions, literature and sociology have been constantly and interrelatedly studied. Nevertheless, this study aims at revealing another interrelation between literature and sociology by referring to the beginning of the twentieth century when the replacement of religious thinking with secular ideas was dominant in modern society. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim detected and studied this shift in modern society and later on literary authors of the time followed the promotion of secularism in their literary works. However, T.S. Eliot reacted to this replacement in his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". He wrote the poem while he was reviewing Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in the journal the Westminster Gazette. This paper argues that T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is written with a mindset loaded by Durkheim’s sociological perspectives such as the notions of the sacred and the profane to further conclude that T. S. Eliot’s creation of Prufrock is consistent with the view that the modern man is unable to establish himself in a society which is devoid of the notions of sacred and profane and that he may consider committing suicide to save himself as the final resort.