مجله مطالعات ادبیات کودک
سال پنجم شماره 1 (پیاپی 9، بهار و تابستان1393)

Gender Stereotypes are a collection of common cultural Clichés of male and female behaviors, attributes and activities usually resulting in sexism. Finding gender patterns commences from the early years of childhood; beside the other socializing means, children’s books have a significant role in transferring social norms and gender identity formation in children. Various studies show that the realistic fictions in children’s literature have produced a stereotype and discriminating image of the male and female. Different factors, such as genre tradition, author’s sex, time of creation of the work and fantastic degree of the work have a perceptible impact on the degree and the kind of sexist stereotypes. Among these various factors, the article tries to evaluate the influences of fantastic atmosphere and characters on the gender stereotype. A study of the selected fantastic fictions published by three well-known writers of children’s literature shows that the degree of gender stereotypes presented in the works has a direct relation with reality or meta-realism (Fantastic vision). There are no gender stereotypes in the fictions which have no element of the usual real world. In the mixed fictions combined of two imaginary and real worlds with fantastic creatures and human beings, the gender stereotypes appear only in non-fantastic part of the work and in the fictions in which realism is dominant, the gender stereotypes are more obvious than two other ones.

Reading translated narrative texts we not only hear the narrator's voice but also that of the translator as the narrator of the translation which is mixed with the original voice. Translator's voice is manifested through linguistic and paratextual elements in the translation. This fact is much highlighted in children's literature since, as OSullivan (2003) puts it, the relation between the (adult) author and the audience (children) is 'asymmetrical'. Moreover, compared to the other genres, translators of children literature feel freer translating these texts thus making themselves more visible. This research intends to show the difference between translator's narration and that of the original author through studying their presence/voice in translated children literature based on Herman's (1996) and Baker's (2000) theories and the narrative model proposed by OSullivan (2003). To this end, three stories by Hans Christian Andersen and their three Persian translators (two translators for each story) are chosen as follows: Ahmad Kasei Pour (1381), Jamshid Navaei (1385) and Mohammad Reza Shams-Parisa Homayunruz (1388). The results show that the translators have used different strategies, either textual or paratextual, in order to narrate the stories and thus making themselves visible differently thus one story has as many narrators as it has translators.

In the present study the authors investigated the potential different effects of Philip Cam and Morteza Khosronejad's thinking stories on the creativity of preschool children. Thirty nine pre-school boys who were selected through cluster random sampling participated in the study. The instrument used for the study was Torrance test of creativity. Covariance analysis and a Tukey post hoc test were used to analyze the data. The results showed a significant difference between the experimental and control groups (f=32/63, p<005), i.e. there was a positive effect of thinking stories on preschool children's creativity regarding the effectiveness of the treatment on fluency, originality, and elaboration subsets of creativity. However, there was not a significant difference observed between the children who were taught through Philip Cam's stories and those who were taught through Morteza Khosronejad's stories.

Clarifying the paradox of authority and freedom is one of the most important concerns of philosophy of children’s literature. The purpose of this paper is to discover and investigate two authors’ view on authority and Freedom in the children’s literature based on the techniques applied in Iranian and English picture-story books. The research is an exploratory and descriptive research. Two picture-story books The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter and I’m a Hungry Mouse, Will Eat You Up by Morteza Khosronejad were chosen for analysis. The analysis showed that both writers have paid attention to the relationship between authority and freedom though their outlooks are different due to historical, social and cultural differences. In Khosronejad’s book there is first freedom while in Potter’s book they are exchanged and work like opposing poles. In both stories the writers use different techniques to give freedom to the child to discover the creative world around him/her in order to facilitate his/her growth. Some of these techniques are: imaginary story line, hidden theme, polyphonic text and picture, intertextuality, metafiction, reversal of situation and shift between reality and imagination.

Joneidnameh (the prologue of Abu Moslemnameh) is an imaginary and fantastic biography of life of the grandfather of Abu Moslem Khorasani in which some elements of the real world are interwoven with fantastic fictional elements by ancient story tellers to create a world in which the process of growth of heroes of epic and history are shown. In this paper first fantasy is introduced and the fantastic elements of Joneidnameh are classified and analyzed. They consist of contradictory structure, binary characterization and themes of epic and religion. The results show that due to the harmony of children’s irregular mind with the structure of fantastic tales, they are the best device to organize the inner turmoil of childhood leading toward adolescence.

This article analyzes war fiction through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and aims to pose a model for war through linguistics. Based on this model three stories for children are analyzed. These stories are investigated to determine if they are conciliating stories or revenging ones. To do so, discursive practices are studied based on Van Dijk (2008) to see whether there are polarization of " us"/ our side and " others"/ the other side or enemy and if it is so, whether the enemy is represented wholly negative and our side quite positive. It is assumed that if a story represents our side vs. the enemy in a polarized way, it is engaged with revenge; if it is not polarized then it is engaged with reconciliation. Stories of reconciliation are suitable for postwar situations as they decrease the hatred toward war actors and help the process of peace between two nations.

Content analysis and literary criticism are often applied in literary researches، specifically children''s literature. Nowadays in many of these researches content analysis is applied with two approaches: Qualitative and quantitative. It seems that qualitative approach in content analysis is similar to literary criticism as a very common approach in literary researches. In this survey 75 research reports have been studied which have been published in Iranian Children''s Literature Studies and the research reports which are available in International Youth Library in Munich. 41 of these researches have criticized and analyzed texts. Some of them have mentioned content analysis as a «Method» and some of them have emphasized on the analytical «Aspect» of their research. Meanwhile it is not easy to differentiate between «Methods» and «Approaches» which have been applied in these researches and many of them have been done through qualitative and analytical approaches based on different types of literary criticism such as Constructivism and Feminism. The utilization of content analysis methods based on literary criticism criteria can be helpful for developing of children''s literature researches.