Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Professor of Persian Language and Literature of Allameh Tabatabaie University, Tehran, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
3 PHD Student in Persian Language and Literature of Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Children’s literature, as an audience-oriented field, has consistently sought to address the cognitive, emotional, and cultural needs of children. In contemporary scholarship, the concept of “childhood” is understood not as a natural and fixed condition, but as a historical and social construct shaped within diverse cultural and ideological contexts. Therefore, children’s literature, in addition to possessing a dynamic nature that allows it to be continually redefined in tandem with evolving conceptions of childhood, also assumes an interdisciplinary nature through its interaction with fields such as philosophy, mysticism, psychology, and educational sciences, deriving its meaning from their convergence. Among the shared concepts within these disciplines, imagination occupies a distinctive position. In both classical theoretical traditions and modern approaches, imagination has been conceived as a mediating faculty between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, or between different domains of the mind. Given the fundamental role of imagination in the process of literary creation as well as in the cognitive and emotional development of the child, the central question of this study is as follows: What common features can be identified in definitions of imagination within philosophy, mysticism, and psychology? In what ways do these shared features resemble the nature of childhood imagination and how might they contribute to clarifying the position of imagination in children’s literature? The significance of this inquiry lies in the fact that establishing the theoretical foundations of children’s literature remains incomplete without recognizing imagination as the connecting link among these disciplines. Moreover, such an approach can offer constructive and illuminating responses to the challenging theoretical questions concerning the nature of children’s literature.
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