This book investigates how cultural sameness and difference has been presented in a variety of forms and genres of children’s literature from Denmark, Germany, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States; ranging from English caricatures of the 1780s to dynamic representations of contemporary cosmopolitan childhood. The chapters address different models of presenting foreigners using examples from children’s educational prints, dramatic performances, travel narratives, comics, and picture books. Contributors illuminate the ways in which the texts negotiate the tensions between the Enlightenment ideal of internationalism and discrete national or ethnic identities cultivated since the Romantic era, providing examples of ethnocentric cultural perspectives and of cultural relativism, as well as instances where discussions of child reader agency indicate how they might participate eventually in a tolerant transnational community.
Table of Content
1. Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: An Introduction, Emer O’Sullivan.- Part I. Ethnography on Display.- 2. Learning to See: Eighteenth-Century Children’s Prints and the Discourse of Othering, Silke Meyer.- 3. Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations, Emer O’Sullivan.- 4. Figuring the World: Representing Children’s Encounters with Other Peoples and Cultures at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Gillian Lathey.- 5. Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer, Amanda M. Brian.- Part II. Internationalism and Tolerance.- 6. Imagining Equality: The Emergence of the Ideas of Tolerance, Universalism, and Human Rights in Danish Magazines for Children, 1750–1800, Nina Christensen.- 7. An Anthropologist Shows Girls a World of Difference: Louis-François Jauffret’s Géographie dramatique, Cynthia J. Koepp.- 8. Information or Exoticization? Constructing Religious Difference in Children’s Information Books, Gabriele von Glasenapp.- Part III. Constructing Self and Nation.- 9. Anxious Encounters: Picturing the Street Child in On the Sidewalks of New York, Lara Saguisag.- 10. Russian Picturebooks from 1922 to 1934: Modernization, Sense of Nationhood, Internationalism, Verena Rutschmann.- 11. Appropriating the “Wild North”: The Image of Canada and Its Exploitation in German Children’s Literature, Martina Seifert.- 12.- Travel as Construction of Self and Nation, Margaret R. Higonnet.- Index
About the author
Emer O’Sullivan is Professor of English Literature at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. She is the author of Kinderliterarische Komparatistik, which won the biennial IRSCL Award for outstanding research and Comparative Children’s Literature, which won the Children’s Literature Association 2007 Book Award, among others.Andrea Immel is Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, USA. She has co-edited four collections of essays including Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe and The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature. Her scholarly facsimile edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book won the Justin G. Schiller Prize.
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