Cognitive Metaphors: the Basis of Fantasy in Children's Myths (Case Study of Samad Behranghi Stories)

Fantasy is the most imaginative genre of story. In the imaginative stories, the writers create a secondary world with new rules by passing beyond real world and breaching the cumbersome rules and frameworks. These worlds include amazing events and fantastic creatures. Samad Behrangi is one of the writers of child and adolescent literature that he connects the adulthood world to childhood world by using fantasy. By emphasis on this style, he expresses the social, cultural and ideological issues for novice readers in tangible way. In this regard, cognitive metaphors play an important role in better perception of some complicated and abstract concepts by children. This article has tried to examine fantasy and cognitive metaphors used in fantastic stories of Samad Behranghi in order to depict how this author, thoughtful and interested in the children and adolescent training, has analyzed the bio-social experiences for less experienced child and adolescent readers using cognitive metaphors. This descriptive and deductive content analytical research showed that the conceptual metaphors in Behranghi's stories imply collectivism and appropriation with socialism beliefs and conditions. Concerning the contextual metaphors, three volumetric, motor and power schemas were mentioned and power schema is related to thinking and eliminating obstacles by Behranghi in the considered goals in the story. The structural metaphors are in the first rank in his stories. The frequency of directional metaphors is the same in the fantasy and real stories