Comparative Children's Literature

Emer O'Sullivan, Anthea Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415305518
• eBook ISBN: 9781134404841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE 2007 CHLA BOOK AWARD!

Children's literature has transcended linguistic and cultural borders since books and magazines for young readers were first produced, with popular books translated throughout the world.

Emer O'Sullivan traces the history of comparative children's literature studies, from the enthusiastic internationalism of the post-war period – which set out from the idea of a supra-national world republic of childhood – to modern comparative criticism. Drawing on the scholarship and children's literature of many cultures and languages, she outlines the constituent areas that structure the field, including contact and transfer studies, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies and image studies. In doing so, she provides the first comprehensive overview of this exciting new research area. Comparative Children's Literature also links the fields of narratology and translation studies, to develop an original and highly valuable communicative model of translation.

Taking in issues of children's 'classics', the canon and world literature for children, Comparative Children's Literature reveals that this branch of literature is not as genuinely international as it is often fondly assumed to be and is essential reading for those interested in the consequences of globalization on children's literature and culture.

1
Comparative literature and children’s literature

The comparative context

The development of a global economy, accompanied by modern commimications and information technology, the fall of political borders, increasing voluntary mobility and emigration as a result of war, poverty or political persecution are all factors that have far-reaching consequences for our approach to cultural products, forcing us to rethink cultural identities beyond traditional national paradigms. The study of transnational cultural products lies at the heart of comparative literature, which was established in the universities of the nineteenth century as a counter-discipline to studies of national language and literature. This opposition determined the subject of comparative literature: whereas ‘national’ philologies concentrated exclusively on literature within the political borders of the nations concerned, comparative literature, as a kind of corrective measure, dealt with so-called Weltliteratur or ‘world literature’. The subject of comparative study goes beyond a single literature; it is what different literatures have in common, as well as the peculiarities and individual features of the various literatures which come to light only when they are seen in relation to others. Its subject traditionally derives from several languages, thus distinguishing it from the study of single literatures.

In view of the fact that individual disciplines of language and literature could no longer be understood as solely national, criticism of the traditional idea of comparative literature was voiced from the late 1980s onwards, to the effect that it needed to be complemented. Critics called for an extension of the subject beyond an exclusive focus on linguistic differences, insisting that cultural differences should become an object of comparative studies of literatures in the same language—for instance, the comparison of Spanish and Latin American literature, or the literatures of the various German-speaking countries. At the same time, under the influence of systems theory and constructivism, new poststructuralist disciplines such as translation studies, gender studies, cultural studies and alterity studies developed which applied new theories and methods to areas on which comparative literature thought it had the monopoly. Analyses of border-crossing phenomena come to the fore in such interdisciplinary studies of literature and culture as New Historicism, a discipline ‘[which] has given scholars new opportunities to cross the boundaries separating history, anthropology, art, politics, literature and economics’ (Veeser 1989a:ix). In particular, the development of the concept of postcolonialism not only proved to be methodologically productive as a way of opening up the subject, but also contributed to the new and further development of comparative literature as a discipline in Asia, Africa and South America, one that, characterized by a shift of perspective, departed from the Eurocentric perspective and its system of values (see Bassnett 1993:6).

Recently, European and American comparative literature, too, has adopted methods and subjects developed in other disciplines. A predominantly literary tendency in investigating the connections between individual texts (usually European or North American), authors, genres, periods and national literatures has been replaced by an interdisciplinary cultural studies approach. In 1993 leading scholars in the American Comparative Literature Association published a report proposing a new, comprehensive definition of comparative literature:

The space of comparison today involves comparisons between artistic productions usually studied by different disciplines; between various cultural constructions of those disciplines; between Western cultural traditions, both high and popular, and those of non-Western cultures; between the pre- and postcontact cultural productions of colonized peoples; between gender constructions defined as feminine and those defined as masculine, or between sexual orientations defined as straight and those defined as gay; between racial and ethnic modes of signifying; between hermeneutic articulations of meaning and materialist analysis of its modes of production and circulation; and much more.

(Bernheimer et al. 1995:41f.)

Comparative literature today, being situated on the interface between national philologies as well as between literary studies and such disciplines as philosophy, history of art, psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, film studies, theatre studies and so on, is, according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘generally and normally recognized as the name for an intellectual and institutional space not where literatures [are] actually compared, but rather where experimental thinking relevant for the future of the Humanities [can] take place’ (1995:401).

For those working in traditional comparative literature, children’s literature was not a subject to be taken seriously. But even in more recent comparative studies, some of which deal with the extensions of the field mentioned above and focus on literatures usually banished to the periphery of cultural discussion, children’s literature is hardly ever mentioned. From the viewpoint of children’s literature studies, the lack of a comparative dimension has occasionally—but repeatedly—been seen as a deficiency. Scholars have emphasized the fact that an adequate survey of children’s literature which ‘evolves from international, rather than national paradigms’ (Bouckaert-Ghesquière 1992:93) can really only be carried out if approached with comparative methods, but for a long time no one went any further than pointing out that this would be desirable. When Mary Ørvig (1981:229) complained: ‘It is a deplorable fact that the entire international children’s book field is lacking in comparative studies’, she was taking her place in a tradition which runs from Mary Thwaite (1963) and Göte Klingberg (1967a), to be continued in the 1980s and 1990s by such writers as Margaret Kinnell (1987), Gertrud Lehnert (1988) and Anne Pellowski (1996). However, some of those who point out that such a dimension is desirable have persuasively contributed to it, and in the context of early interest in the internationalism of children’s literature first steps towards comparative studies were taken, showing the way forward to a genuinely comparative approach to children’s literature that has, albeit hesitantly, been developing in recent years.

Paul Hazard: a comparatist turns to children’s literature

With Paul Hazard’s Les livres, les enfants et les hommes [Books, children and men] (1932), a book on children’s literature was published by a leading figure in the field of comparative studies at a time when children’s literature hardly existed as far as comparative literature and academic literary criticism were concerned.¹ However, Hazard did not regard his study as a first step in a new branch of scholarship but as a plea for the right of children to appropriate, imaginative, non-didactic books, and for a literary education through reading texts of high aesthetic quality, which he ascribes to a series of European children’s classics. He combines his regard for literary education with a comparative account of the history of various European traditions in children’s literature, and an attempt to do justice to their respective national strengths. Hazard sets out from an image of childhood which owes much to the Romantic myth. He puts the emphasis on imagination as the child’s strongest urge, and on the distance between the childhood and adult realms, linking the former with the archaic. Children, he says, need a kind of literature that reifies the nature of childhood in order to achieve a free, childish identity. In one of the most frequently quoted passages of the book, he has children appealing to adults:

‘Give us books,’ say the children; ‘give us wings. You who are powerful and strong, help us to escape into the faraway Build us azure palaces in the midst of enchanted gardens. Show us fairies strolling about in the moonlight. We are willing to learn everything that we are taught at school, but, please, let us keep our dreams.’

(Hazard 1944:4)

Hazard also writes about the part children’s literature plays in the construction of a specific cultural or national identity. As he sees it, children’s literature forms the soul of a nation and preserves its characteristic features. In a controversial section of the work headed ‘Superiority of the North over the South’, he compares the achievements in children’s literature of several European countries. He dismisses Spain entirely and points out that the two Italian masterpieces —Pinocchio and Cuore— were belated. He sets the generally poor tradition of the South against that of the North with its English nursery rhymes, school stories such as Tom Brown’s Schooldays, authors of the calibre of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Twain, Pushkin, Gogol and Hans Christian Andersen. Hazard sees Andersen as supreme not just in the North but in all children’s literature because Andersen is unique in his capacity for entering into the very soul of beings and of things’ (ibid.: 96). He offers two explanations for the superiority of the North. The first tries to account for the specific development and nature of the imagination using the old—and discredited— theory of climate to explain the character of nations. Speaking of Andersen, he says:

How conscious we are in all this of the powerful imagination of the North, instinct with sensitiveness! How different it is from the imagination of the South which etches everything sharply under the direct brilliance of the sun! Beneath this sky laden with mists, where the light remains timid and gray even on the fairest days, we grasp the significance of doubts and confusions. There the sharpness of a too clear vision will not belie the man who sees grimacing faces in the tree roots, who peoples the sea with phantoms delicately traced on its grayish expanse.

(ibid.: 99f.)

Hazard’s second explanation addresses a question of central importance for a comparative study of the development of children’s literature: the different concepts of childhood in different cultures. In contrast to the educational ideals of the Romance-language areas, he claims, childhood exists in its own right in northern European cultures: ‘For the Latins, children have never been anything but future men. The Nordics have understood better this truer truth, that men are only grown-up children’ (ibid.: 110).

Although his approach may have been questionable, Hazard none the less addressed comparative aspects of the subject such as differing concepts of childhood, different traditions of children’s literature specific to certain nations, and different mentalities. However, his work does deviate in some surprising ways from the methods of comparative study. Hazard insists that children simply took what they needed from the treasury of adult literature—the novels of Defoe, Swift and so on. This is a romantic idea which will not stand up to either the literary theory of the relationship between children’s and adult literature, or an examination of the conditions of literary production and international transfer. Hazard takes little notice anyway of the processes of actual cultural exchange; he does not reflect on the procedures of translation and adaptation, but sets out by assuming that children’s literature communicates across all borders. This point leads us to the aspect of the book which has proved most durable: although Hazard recognizes national features in the literatures of various groups and ascribes significance to them, he imagines a place of childhood which transcends all political and linguistic boundaries:

Children’s books keep alive a sense of nationality; but they also keep alive a sense of humanity. They describe their native land lovingly, but they also describe faraway lands where unknown brothers live. They understand the essential quality of their own race; but each of them is a messenger that goes beyond mountains and rivers, beyond the seas, to the very ends of the world in search of new friendships. Every country gives and every country receives— innumerable are the exchanges—and so it comes about that in our first impressionable years the universal republic of childhood is born.

(Hazard 1944:146)

The wide international appreciation of Hazard’s work on children’s literature after the Second World War (the American translation appeared in 1944, the German translation in 1952, translations into Swedish, Czech and other languages followed) conflned itself mainly to the idea of the humanizing function of books in the universal republic of childhood, a Utopia of international understanding. In the post-war period the idea of the universal republic of childhood became a repository for the traumatic experiences of adults. Bertha E.Mahony writes in her foreword to the translation of Hazard that appeared in 1944:

Today it seems likely that humanity’s longing for a world commonwealth of nations, which shall move towards the abolishment of periodic wholesale destruction and make the brotherhood of men more possible, will express itself in a second attempt at such an organisation. Paul Hazard reminds us in words which can scarcely be bettered that the world republic of childhood already exists.

(Mahony 1944:vii)

But the concept of universal childhood is a Romantic abstraction which ignores the real conditions of children’s communication across borders. There is no ‘world republic of childhood’ in which the conditions are in any way on a par with one another. Many children in developing countries are excluded from all but the most basic education, while their counterparts in wealthy countries are afforded a comparatively protracted and protected childhood and education. While the former might probably never see or be able to read a children’s book, most of the latter have access to unlimited books and other media which cater for their age groups and leisure habits. ‘The child’ can’t be spoken about as a singular entity; class, ethnic origin, gender, geopolitical location and economic circumstances are all elements which create differences between real children in real places.

The vision of the universal child, the same the world over, refuses to acknowledge difficulties and contradictions in relation to childhood, offering in their place a glorification of the child, cast in the role of innocent saviour of mankind in a tradition which reaches back to Rousseau’s Émile with its creed that with every child humankind receives another chance for positive renewal. Children’s literature conceived in this spirit serves as a site on which adult difficulties are addressed and often placated; it is about promises which the adults’ generations could not keep, amongst them international understanding and world peace.

However, criticism of the enthusiastic over-estimation of the potential beneficial effects of children’s literature should not make us forget that post-war measures to foster literary exchange in the cause of international understanding did encourage a generally open-minded attitude towards the literatures of other nations. This is particularly clear from the work of the International Youth Library (IYL) and its founder Jella Lepman. In 1946 Lepman turned to twenty nations, most of which had been at war with Germany only a year before, asking for donations to set up an international exhibition of children’s literature in Munich. Her appeal ran: ‘Bit by bit…let us set this upside down world right again by starting with the children. They will show the grown-ups the way to go’ (Lepman 2002:33). In her work at the IYL Lepman tried to put the ideal of international understanding through children’s literature into practice by means of many activities, and by her part in the founding of IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People) in 1953.²

Approaches to comparative children’s literature

An approach which emphasizes the internationalism of children’s literature tends to be characteristic of the important monographs published in the 1950s —see, for instance, Bettina Hürlimann’s major survey of European children’s literature, Europäische Kinderbücher aus drei Jahrhunderten [Three centuries of European children’s books] (1959), Luigi Santucci’s study Letteratura Infantile [Children’s literature] (1958), which takes up Hazard’s ideas by presenting fantasy as the literary genre best suited to children, and Mary Thwaite’s From Primer to Pleasure in Reading (1963). In 1968 Anne Pellowski, founder of the Information Center on Children’s Cultures, published a ground-breaking work in the form of an extensive annotated bibliography, The World of Children’s Literature. Its aim was to provide ‘the information (or the means to it) which would lead to an accurate picture of the development of children’s literature in every country where it presently exists, even in the most formative stages’ (Pellowski 1968:1). She intended this work to be the basis for comparative study of the subject.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the beginning of an interest in translations, and with translation questions of adaptation and reception emerge for the first time. Three names are pre-eminent: those of Richard Bamberger, for many years director of the Internationales Institut für Jugendliteratur und Leseforschung [International Institute for Children’s Literature and Reading Research] in Vienna, Walter Scherf, Lepman’s successor at the IYL, and Göte Klingberg, co-founder in 1970 of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL). Bamberger’s observations on the importance of translations (1961) are among the first to be found in any critical writing on children’s literature. Scherf wrote many articles on reciprocal influences in children’s literature—for instance, the influence of Spain and Great Britain on children’s literature in Germany (1976). A growing interest in the translation of children’s literature is indicated by the third IRSCL conference organized by Göte Klingberg and Mary Ørvig in 1976, which was devoted to that subject (see Klingberg, Ørvig and Amor 1978). In his book Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the Translators (1986) Klingberg systematically studied the different ways in which references in the source texts were adapted in translation. Klingberg’s major contribution to the comparative study of children’s literature, together with his theoretical writings, consist in the production of complete annotated bibliographies of all children’s books published in Sweden, including translated books;³ using these, scholars could embark on studies of the distribution and reception in Sweden of literature from vari...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Comparative literature and children’s literature
• 2: Constituent areas of comparative children’s literature
• 3: The development, culturespecific status and international exchange of children’s literatures
• 4: Children’s literature in translation
• 5: The implied translator and the implied reader in translated children’s literature
• 6: World literature and children’s classics
• Notes
• Bibliography