In 2005 Emer O'Sullivan published the most comprehensive outline to date of a comparative approach to the study of literature and other cultural productions for the young. She presents nine constituent areas of comparative study in relation to children's literature (theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature, comparative history of children's literature studies), which she illustrates with examples from around the world. But, although extensive, O'Sullivan's proposal is not without its blind spots, and she acknowledges that it “can only be enhanced by future discussion and modification” (12). With the aim of bolstering the field of children's literature, I here propose an area of comparative research overlooked by O'Sullivan. I also suggest extensions to her conception of comparative literature and to her handling of reception or reader response.
The recent furore over Tintin au Congo in Britain is symptomatic of Western concerns about the perpetuation of negative racial stereotypes within much classic children's literature. This article interrogates such anxiety via discussion of three texts (by Hergé, Michel Tournier and Maryse Condé) produced for a European readership but set and – crucially – read in other parts of the world. Each text demonstrates the difficulty of predicting responses which frequently confound expectations and vary widely according to the situation of the reader. An ostensibly disparaging text can be a source of pride and hilarity, whilst a work produced to fight the cause of an oppressed community can distress and disturb members of that very group. Critical attendance to the reception of canonical texts within colonial and postcolonial settings will, it is argued, provide the most satisfactory response to the calls for censorship which utterly neglect alternative, resistant readings and non-European readers.
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