Iranian Children’s Literature: A Success Story Nationally and Globally

Abstract

Children’s literature has been more successful internationally than Iranian adult fiction and it is also a field that is more professionalised than the one for adults. In this chapter, I analyse children’s literature to understand phenomena that have been occurring in the larger field. The chapter analyses the history of Iranian children’s literature in the past decades, zooms in on the important institutions supporting it, and theorises both its importance to the Islamic republic and its reception nationally and globally, explaining its relative success. This chapter concludes the first part of the book, where I have discussed the production and circulation of Iranian literature within Iran. In the second part, I move to these topics outside of the Iranian borders and analyse the literary relations between the Iranian diaspora and Iran as well as the circulation of Iranian literature in languages other than Persian for non-Iranian readers.