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

This book investigates how cultural sameness and difference has been presented in a variety of forms and genres of childrens 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 childrens 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.

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1. Sameness and Difference in Childrens Literature: An Introduction, Emer OSullivan.- Part I. Ethnography on Display.- 2. Learning to See: Eighteenth-Century Childrens Prints and the Discourse of Othering, Silke Meyer.- 3. Picturing the World for Children: Early Nineteenth-Century Images of Foreign Nations, Emer OSullivan.- 4. Figuring the World: Representing Childrens Encounters with Other Peoples and Cultures at the Great Exhibition of 1851, Gillian Lathey.- 5. Imagining the World in Bavarian Childrens 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, 17501800, Nina Christensen.- 7. An Anthropologist Shows Girls a World of Difference: Louis-Fran?ois Jauffrets G?ographie dramatique, Cynthia J. Koepp.- 8. Information or Exoticization? Constructing Religious Differlƒ