Why Curious George Did Not Speak: The Conspicuous Multilingualism of Margret and H.A. Rey

60. Contact linguistics and literary studies

“…Certain historically sanctioned forms of literary production over this period became some of the most charismatic 'Trojan horses' for ideological monolingualism and linguistic nationalism, cloaked as they were in the garb of aesthetic exploration and cosmopolitan progress. Consolidating these forms in the 20 th century, trade publishing houses made the monolingual, translatable book their primary and prohibitive mode of commercial salience (Komska 2018;Lennon 2011). As literary markets began to extensively globalize in the 1980s, the market imperative to acquire and option quintessentially translatable books for a roster of imagined end-user monolingual markets, in accordance with the model of 'lingualism' described above, began in turn to restructure the production of literature across borders (Rectanus 1987).…”