Despite the fact that children’s literature has always been a vital part of the transnational exchange of literatures, and continues to be the healthiest sector of the publishing industry internationally, the category is still generally neglected in scholarly discussions of world literature. Anthologies of world literature for classroom use generally omit writing for children, and research monographs exploring models of comparative and world literatures are noticeably silent on the subject (Paul Hazard’s classic 1932 manifesto, Les livres, les enfants et les hommes, and Emer O’Sullivan’s seminal 2005 book, Comparative Children’s Literature, are rare and isolated exceptions). This session will launch a broader conversation intended to address this paucity of comparative and global discussion on children’s literature. In the spirit of the presider’s 2021 chapter in The Cambridge History of World Literature, “World Children’s Literature,” this session at MLA 2027 will be the first of several conversations designed to gather a geographically and methodologically diverse group of scholars who will eventually work collaboratively to shape a book proposal entitled Children’s Literature as World Literature. If published as part of the well-established Literatures as World Literatures book series at Bloomsbury Publishing (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/series/literatures-as-world-literature/), the book would be the first global scholarly anthology devoted to engaging with children’s literature specifically in its “world-literary dimensions.”

Each of the four speakers, selected for their diverse non-Eurocentric perspectives, will prepare a presentation of no more than 12 minutes to ensure the last 25 minutes are reserved for Q&A, discussion, and feedback on how these papers could be shaped for eventual inclusion in the proposed book project. This panel includes two associate and two full professors from public (2) and private (2) institutions from across the U.S. (3) and Canada (1) who represent a broad range of linguistic and methodological expertise in the field of children’s literature (Anglophone, Slavic, Korean, and Japanese).

The field of translation studies focuses on the production and reception of texts, but rarely on translators themselves. Melek Ortabasi will begin the session by addressing the role of the translator in the production and dissemination of world children’s literature by exploring the work of Iwaya Sazanami (1870-1933). An author and even more importantly a translator, Sazanami was instrumental in reinventing folklore as modern Japanese children’s literature, deploying his study of German folk- and fairytales to transform this traditional genre not only into reading material appropriate for the emerging modern child readership, but successfully building it into the foundation of a Japanese national literary canon.

Sara Pankenier Weld examines the instrumental role played by a similar figure in a different linguistic tradition. Few know that Leo Tolstoy abandoned his literary career to open a school for peasant children and devoted many years to curating world literature for a child audience. Drawing on folk wisdom and stories from a global tradition, Tolstoy’s translation and curation work shows that children’s literature has, historically, always been world literature. One might even argue that children’s literature is the original world literature, considering the circulation of stories in the history of human culture, reproduced through the intergenerational communication that children’s literature represents and Tolstoy made possible for the children in the school he founded.

The next two papers shift the focus to how particular works of children’s literature manifest on local and global levels. Janneke van de Stadt examines a seminal work of world children’s literature, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Although it has been translated from English into several dozen languages, different versions often express resistance toward the “disobedient” protagonist Max, who is sometimes regarded as an inappropriate model. By examining how the verbal and visual portrayal of Max’s activities as “mischief” and his characterization as a “wild thing” are interpreted, translated, and understood in the transnational context, we can better understand how the book’s conception of childhood has been perceived beyond the Anglophone world since its debut in the countercultural 1960’s.

Dafna Zur returns the discussion to a further exploration of how world children’s literature has always, paradoxically, played a critical role in local nation-building projects. On the Korean Peninsula, for example, literature for children was mobilized for the development of national identity, particularly after the 1945 division into North and South Korea. Children’s sung poems (tongyo) demonstrate the global-national nexus clearly: while they are linguistically and idiomatically local, they are globally legible sonically and rhythmically. A consideration of poetry and music together reveals how tongyo evince their investment in “authentic” national identity, but still connect with sonorities that go beyond regional or national boundaries.