Abstract
In this introductory chapter to a volume of essays which investigate cultural sameness and difference for children in a variety of forms and genres in texts from Denmark, Germany, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States from the last two hundred years, O’Sullivan and Immel use Peter Sís’s multi-layered, transnational picturebook Madlenka (2000), about how a young girl playfully negotiates the world within her block, as a template to address the overriding questions and central theoretical issues of the volume. These are: identity and belonging; sameness and difference; representation, perspective and agency (who is seeing, what (or who) is seen, how are they represented, and (potentially) why are they represented in this way?); audience; and media, form and genre. The essays are referenced in each part of the theoretical discussion, creating links and connections across materials, cultures and epochs in a chapter which provides a wide context and a discerning way to look at diversity and national identity tropes in children’s literature today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of the interesting, but unknown, story by Ives Hurry, see the post “The Good Slave and Her Master as Object Lessons in 1790s England,” published February 19, 2016, on the curatorial blog of the Cotsen Children’s Library (http://blogs.princeton.edu/cotsen).
- 2.
New York is explicitly named in the paratexts, both on the dust cover and in Sís’s dedication at the end of the book to his wife, Terry, daughter, Madeleine (Madlenka), and son, Matej, all of whom, it says, were born there (Sís 2000). The book is not paginated.
- 3.
Sís’s work in general reveals a fascination with maps and cartography; a 2014 exhibition of his work at the Czech Center in New York was aptly titled “Cartography of the Mind”.
- 4.
Added to this is the contextual information that in Madlenka Sís reflects not only on his own status as a migrant in New York by portraying people from all over the world who have made that city their home, but also on how the childhoods of his children, who can freely mingle with people from different countries and cultures, contrast greatly with his own in (then communist) Prague, where “people really wouldn’t speak to each other because they were just simply afraid to—just—the political regime and climate was terrible” (Sís 2010, 3.37–45).
- 5.
O’Sullivan (2017) historicizes the concept of the essential sameness of children, traces its occurrence in more recent debates, and links it to contemporary discussions of constructions of childhood.
- 6.
Trumpener writes: “Sís reconciles apparently disparate genres within expository picturebooks: sketchbook experiments in perspective and cross-section; city planning books; panoramas. What enables fresh perception, paradoxically, is an immersion in much older visual conventions, and awareness of the palimpsestic layers of urban spaces” (2009, 65).
- 7.
A. O. Scott speaks of the “whimsical, well-intentioned multiculturalism” in Madlenka (2000).
- 8.
Another key to the childish nature of these pictures could lie in what Sís told children in an interview in 1995: “Because I have been in this country for only ten years, I see things much like a ten-year-old child, like people waving for taxis and riding in elevators. I did not see this in Prague” (Puma and Ng 1995).
- 9.
Although Madlenka is the agent who discovers the world through her neighbors, the satellite perspective at the beginning of the book, which focuses on her from outer space before zooming in through the different levels, might suggest that she is not only a gazer but also a gazee, under surveillance.
- 10.
Beyond addressing the nationality or ethnic identification of the spected, it is also worth asking whether the spected is an adult or a child, and what implications might be involved. Is there generally a supposition that adults are more “fixed” in their ethnic or national “identity” than children? In her chapter, Lara Saguisag argues that the cartoon series On the Sidewalks of New York, which reflects tensions between the Irish and other cultural groups at the time of its publication at the end of the nineteenth century, differentiates between the ethnic adult and the ethnic child. The latter is presented as a figure to sympathize with and is less threatening than the adult because the child is still malleable and could potentially assimilate.
- 11.
Sanne Parlevliet (2015) illustrates an interesting intersection of two relevant discourses for national education when she shows how Dutch historical fiction for children written between 1914 and 1935 initially held on to the traditional glorification of nationality, but then (at least partially) aligned itself with the prevalent educational discourse of tolerance by sometimes framing battles in the spirit of peace education.
References
Primary Sources
Anon. 1756. A View of the Habits of Most Countries in the World. London: Joseph Hawkins.
Ganeshram, R. 2016. A Birthday Cake for George Washington. Illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton. New York: Scholastic.
Ives Hurry, M. M. 1795. Goodness Not Confined to Complexion or Form. In Tales of Instruction and Amusement. London: E. Newbery.
Mortimer, F. L. 2005. The Clumsiest People in Europe, or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, ed. Todd Pruzan. New York: Bloomsbury.
Oncle Hansi [Jean-Jacques Waltz]. 1914. Mon village, ceux qui noublient pas. Paris: H. Floury.
Oncle Hansi [Jean-Jacques Waltz]. 1920. L’Alsace heureuse. Paris: H. Floury.
Schachner, J. 2003. Skippyjon Jones. New York: Dutton Children’s Books.
Sís, P. 2000. Madlenka. New York: Frances Foster Books.
Secondary Sources
Beller, M., and J. Leerssen (eds.). 2007. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Eco, U. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press.
Hall, S. 1997. Introduction. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, 1–14. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage in association with the Open University.
Leerssen, J. 2003. National Identity and National Stereotype. In Images. http://www.imagologica.eu/leerssen (accessed December 14, 2015).
Leerssen, J. 2007. Imagology: History and Method. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 17–32. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Leerssen, J. 2012. Ethnotypen sind Akteure: Zur Poetik und Rhetorik des Vorurteils. In Wir und die Anderen: Stereotypen in der Schweiz. 27. Kolloquium (2011) der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, ed. B. Engler, 5–20. Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg.
Lidchi, H. 1997. The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, 151–222. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage in association with the Open University.
McCallum, R. 1997. Cultural Solipsism, National Identities and the Discourse of Multiculturalism in Australian Picturebooks. Ariel 28(1): 101–16.
McGillis, R. 2000. Introduction. In Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context, ed. R. McGillis, xix–xxxii. New York, London: Garland Publishing.
O’Sullivan, E. 1989. Das ästhetische Potential nationaler Stereotypen in literarischen Texten: Auf der Grundlage einer Untersuchung des Englandbildes in der deutschsprachigen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur nach 1960. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.
O’Sullivan, E. 2011. The Same But Different: Ambivalent Internationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Books. Princeton University Library Chronicle 72(3): 683–712.
O’Sullivan, E. 2017. Discourses of Internationalism in Children’s Literature. In Child Governance and Autonomy in Children’s Literature: Where Children Rule, ed. C. Kelen and B. Sundmark, 30–42. New York: Routledge.
Parlevliet, S. 2015. Fiction for Peace? Domestic Identity, National Othering and Peace Education in Dutch Historical Novels for Children, 1914–1935. International Research in Children’s Literature 8(1): 17–30.
Puma, J., and B. Ng. 1995. On the Job with Peter Sís [interview]. http://www.zuzu.org/sisinterview.html (accessed December 8, 2015).
Rigney, A. 2007. Memory. In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, ed. M. Beller and J. Leerssen, 360–63. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Scott, A. O. 2000. In the Universe, On a Planet, On a Block. New York Times Book Review, November 19. https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/19/reviews/001119.19scottt.html (accessed December 14, 2015).
Sís, P. 2010. Video Interview with Reading Rockets “Meet the Author.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LovauoreX_k (accessed December 8, 2015).
Szerszynski, B., and J. Urry. 2006. Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar. British Journal of Sociology 57(1): 113–31.
Trumpener, K. 2009. Picturebook Worlds and Ways of Seeing. In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. M. O. Grenby and A. Immel, 55–75. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Turner, G. 1986. National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Ungerer, T. 1998. A Childhood under the Nazis. Boulder, CO: Tomico.
Urry, J. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Sullivan, E., Immel, A. (2017). Sameness and Difference in Children’s Literature: An Introduction. In: O'Sullivan, E., Immel, A. (eds) Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-46168-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46169-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)