Children’s literature does not have a long history in Iran and works in this field goes back to the era of Iranian constitutional revolution and the modernization of Iranian society. It is clear that modernism and its ideologies such as liberalism, nationalism and Marxi
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Children’s literature does not have a long history in Iran and works in this field goes back to the era of Iranian constitutional revolution and the modernization of Iranian society. It is clear that modernism and its ideologies such as liberalism, nationalism and Marxism have contributed to the emergence and development of children’s literature. The fact that how two of the most famous children works of that time (“Ahmad's Book” and “Little Black Fish”) were ideological, can be considered as a proof for this claim. For this reason the main question in the present research is the nature of the relation between contemporary ideologies and children’s literature, and to answer this question two stories, Ahmad's Book (1932) and Little Black Fish (1968) and also the poems in the textbooks of the first Pahlavi era (1925-1941) are studied while each one of them can be assigned to one of the main ideologies in Iran's contemporary history before the Islamic revolution. Due to the fact that different contemporary ideologies have different attitudes towards children, they provide different norms and patterns for children's literature. For example, according to liberalism, which is represented roughly by Talboof’s “Ahmad’s book” the appropriate literature for children is the one that acquaints them with various aspects of critical thinking while nationalism – the poems selected from children’s textbooks in Pahlavi era reflect this ideology- want to create and institutionalize a sense of devotion and sacrifice in children. According to Marxism as the most revolutionary contemporary ideology, the appropriate type of literature for the children is the one that enlightens them (class consciousness, etc.), and make them ready for the final battle to transform the society.
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