Introduction

This chapter aims to leave the well-worn path of Anglophone and European scholarship and to explore some of the scholarship that concerns itself with children's literature and media in the Majority World – principally Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and to commission essays from "insider", embedded scholars. The collection describes children's literatures not from a global perspective but as local products characterized by local concepts of childhood and of the purposes underpinning children's literature, and then more particularly by local genres, styles, registers and applications. Local literatures are repertoires that are grounded in local sociolinguistic systems and take shape in relation with, and sometimes in opposition to, social and cultural ideologies and political systems. Latin American children's literature and criticism in Spanish, for example, circulates throughout Latin America, on Europe's Iberian peninsula, and to some extent in the USA. The temporal relationship between the emergence of children's literature and impact of modernity varies widely across the world.