ABSTRACT
The term “Orientalism” is associated with Edward Said (1978). The phenomenon dates, however, considerably further back in time, to the period when the Western world fi rst came into contact with the Orient and was dazzled by the completely different mentality, culture and art. The “chinoiserie” and “japonism” as the specifi c trends of the Western art, architecture, and partly literature, were a combination of admiration and appropriation. The latter has been severely criticized in postcolonial theory. Orientalism in children’s literature has been studied with concepts and tools from postcolonial theory (e.g. Nodelman 1992; McGillis 1997, 2000), yet without an overall heterological context.
