ABSTRACT
Among the central questions of comparative children’s literature theory to be discussed in this chapter are the conditions of the development of children’s literature, its culture-specific status, and its international exchange. Most descriptive models are based on developments in the industrialized countries of north-west Europe, the birthplace of children’s literature, and are often presented as universal rather than culture-specific accounts of-for instance-German-language, Englishlanguage or West European children’s literature. This idea of universal patterns in the development of children’s literature will be criticized in the following pages by analysis of differences in the course of its development in different countries, in the light of their respective historical, political, economic and cultural situations.
