Storytelling for a republic of childhood: rebranding China’s national images in children’s literature

Abstract

This article delineates the discursive trajectory of Chinese children’s literature and explicates its specific storytelling strategies to integrate nation and narration, tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism. At the intersection of nation building, storytelling and comparative literature, it is argued that Chinese children’s literature, developed from a comparative perspective and as an alternative vision of Paul Hazard’s “universal republic of childhood,” not only manifests paradoxical literary features, given the asymmetry of global literary distribution and power relations, but also converges with and enriches world children’s literature in China’s ongoing process of raising its cultural soft power. The paradox inherent in globalising Chinese children’s literature leads to the reconceptualisation of translation and cross-cultural readability of genres as essential to a richer construct of national images on the world literary map.