From English caricatures of the 1780s, through 19th and early 20th century culture-specific perspectives, to dynamic representations of contemporary cosmopolitan childhood, the essays in this volume investigate 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
The chapters address different models of presenting foreigners, from static exhibitions in children’s educational prints to cultural geography in dramatic performance, travel narratives as construction of self and shaping of nation, and ethnicity as entertainment in comics and picturebooks. The texts negotiate the tensions between the Enlightenment ideal of internationalism and discrete national and ethnic identities since the Romantic era, providing examples of ethnocentric cultural perspectives and of cultural relativism, of images instrumentalized in the service of ideology and propaganda, but also of texts granting the child reader agency in discussions about how they might participate eventually in a tolerant transnational community.