What is the connection between Christoph Hein's Das Wildpferd hinter dem Kachelofen und A.A.Milne's Winnie the Pooh? An intertextuality which transcends linguistic, cultural and temporal boundaries and offers a dialogue of diverse images of childhood. It is also a rich example of a phenomenon in children's literature of interest from a comparative point of view. This article introduces the nascent field of Comparative Children's Literary Studies which merges and adapts questions and issues of Comparative Literature and Children's Literature Studies. Drawing on examples from European children's literatures and theories it sketches eight constituent areas of the field - general theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics of children's literature, intertextuality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature and comparative history of children's literature studies and gives a brief description of what they encompass. Two aspects are dealt with in more detail: image studies with special focus on the issue of gender and national stereotypes, and contact and transfer studies ...