International Children's Literature

One of the major changes in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly over the last four years has been our increased attention to children's literature published in languages other than English. In the twentieth century, it might have been acceptable for readers of the Quarterly to learn only about books that were available to them in translation, but in the global world of the twenty-first century, that is no longer enough. Thus, in 2002 Maria Nikolajeva began a unique column for the Quarterly in which she solicited peer-reviewed essays about the development of children's literature as both a literature and a discipline from scholars in various countries. The column so far has described German and Spanish children's literature, and this issue's column includes a rich treatment of Japanese children's literature. Columns on French and Danish children's literature are forthcoming.

Throughout the world, specific research projects or research centers have generated increasing attention for children's literature. The ChilPA project in Finland, for example, helped pave the way for the electronic consortium of scholars involved in the Nordic Network for Children's Literature Research. Japan's centers include the International Institute for Children's Literature, Osaka; the Miyazawa Kenji Association Iihatobu Center; and the Niimi Nankichi Memorial Center. Germany also hosts several notable centers, including the Center for Research on Reading and Children's Media at the Cologne College of Education, the Reading Center of the College of Education of Heidelberg, the Oldenburg Research Center of Children's Literature, and the German Academy of Children's Literature. In Spain, the Center for the Study of Reading and Children's Literature is at the University of Castile and La Mancha in Cuenca; the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Center in Salamanca also focuses on children's literature. The Charles Perrault International Institute is at the Université Paris XIII. The International Institute for Children's Literature and Research on Reading is in Vienna, and the Swiss Institute of Children's Literature/Johanna Spyri Foundation is in Zurich. The Danish government founded the Centre for Children's Literature at the Danish University of Education in 1998. This is only a brief sampling of the many research centers that exist worldwide, so any scholar in North America or the U.K. who thinks we are alone in the study of children's literature easily stands accused of parochialism.

The international column is one of the Children's Literature Association's attempts to respond to this world community of children's literature scholars. But the inclusion of that column is not the only aspect of internationalism to increase in the Quarterly over the last several years. International submissions have accounted for 28% of our submissions in the last four years. While not all international submissions deal with national literatures, the marked increase in such papers in the last year alone created a situation in which the editorial staff decided to dedicate a special volume to international children's literature. The five essays in this volume each offers insights into literature from the perspective of a different country: Italy, Japan, Spain, France, and Australia. The essays include everything from historical archival historicism to poststructural narrative theories. Katia Pizzi's "Building a Nation: the National Question in Vamba's Giornalino della Domenica, First Series (1906-1911)" traces the ideological workings of an early Italian journal for children. Clare Bradford's "Transformative Fictions: Postcolonial Encounters in Australian Texts" analyzes the role of language in depicting racial tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in Phillip Gwynne's Nukkin Ya, Melissa Lucashenko's Killing Darcy, and Meme McDonald and Boori Pryor's Njunjul the Sun. In "Childhood Revisited: On the Relationship between Childhood Studies and Children's Literature," Nina Christensen analyzes the representation of childhood as it appears in six Danish picture books in the last fifty years. Louise Salstad relies on narrative theory to assess a popular children's series in Spain in her essay, "Narratee and Implied Readers in the Manolito Gafotas Series: A Case of Triple Address." Claire Malarte-Feldman traces the workings of intertextuality in illustrations in "Folk Materials, Re...