"M & amacr;hpish & amacr;ni" ("Moon-forehead"), "Kh & amacr;leh Suskeh"("Auntie Cockroach"), and "Namak & imacr;," three popular Iranian folk tales often adapted faithfully in children's picture books, are the foci in this paper.1 This essay reads the three stories to identify schema modes and patterns of behavior in the female characters. When put together, these tales indicate the maladaptive strategies in the process of socialization that many Iranian girls and women undergo. The schema modes of Compliant Surrenderer, Vulnerable Child, and Dependent Personality very often overlap in one tale and can be frequently traced in tales with women protagonists, promoting key examples of girlhood and womanhood. Toxic masculinity and fragile femininity are systematically promoted in the Iranian culture industry; therefore, it is necessary to encourage Iranian writers, illustrators, and readers to practice collaborative critical thinking as the most effective way of raising awareness about internalized and self-sabotaging paradigms of gender.
Soviet children's literature had a considerable following in India between the late 1960s and early 1990s, when literary works from the Soviet Union were widely translated into Indian languages. The dissemination of these works was informed by the sociopolitical milieu of the period, especially the Cold War. This article analyzes Maaya-Lokam: Russian Ezhuthukaarudae Kutti-Kathakal ( (The Faerie: Children's Tales by Russian Writers) (1986), an anthology of translations of literary fairy tales from Russian to Malayalam, the official language of the south-Indian state of Keralam, and delineates the adult normative discourses that are present in the tales, which can be discerned in the manner in which the child is posited in relation to the adult. The article thus tries to engage with the dominant discourses that had informed the Russian conception of childhood during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Jewell Parker Rhodes's middle-grade novel Ghost Boys (2018) depicts the afterlife of Jerome, a young black boy who was murdered by a White police officer. Charles Kingsley's Victorian fantasy novel The Water-Babies: A Tale for a Land Baby (1863) follows the afterlife of a young chimney sweep, Tom, who drowns after being falsely accused of stealing from the estate of a wealthy landowner. In this article, I parallel the two works, bridging the societal concerns of two eras and two nations within two important works of fiction for children. I pay special attention to the beautiful young White girl each author places at the center of the boys' labyrinthine afterlife journey.
