Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day

by Emer O'Sullivan (Editor), Andrea Immel (Editor)

Overview

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.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137461698
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	08/31/2017
Series:	Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	268
File size:	3 MB

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.

Table of Contents

Contents

 

 

Series Editors’ Preface 

Acknowledgments 

 

Notes on Contributors

 

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       

Editorial Reviews

This book opens the way for a welcome transformation of our understanding of the dynamics and representation of cultural difference by the field of aesthetics.” (Blanka Grzegorczyk, International Research in Children's Literature, Vol. 13 (2), December, 2020)

From the Publisher