Taiwanese Picturebooks and Children’s Literature as World Literature *

Abstract

Drawing on David Damrosch’s theory of world literature, the chapter explores the ways in which Chih-Yuan Chen’s Guji Guji (2003), an award-winning Taiwanese picturebook, circulates in the global space to become a work of world literature. The chapter first examines the trajectories and transformations of Guji Guji from a local picturebook to a global text and the ways it is translated and incorporated into (an)other linguistic and cultural spaces through diverse working systems—one associated with independent publishing houses and the other involving the mechanism of book selection and recommendation commonly practiced and endorsed by nationwide library associations. The circularity of Guji Guji through theatrical adaptions in various forms are subsequently explored. It is argued that hybridity or transculturality is embedded in the process of reception and circulation, and that this is crucial in imagining a local text as world literature. Transculturality is particularly evident when a local text takes on multifold new lives in transnational adaptations and reproductions. It is also visible when a text double-tracks or refracts as it moves into the wider world and back to its homeplace.