Introduction

After the Second World War the notion that children’s literature could promote international understanding became a credo: children’s literature, crossing all borders with ease, was expected to give rise to a Utopian ‘universal republic of childhood’. Since the late twentieth century we have been experiencing a different type of internationalism, this time not as an idealistic postulate but as the result of global market forces; it is generated by multinational media companies which manufacture products for children all over the world. Neither the idealistic postulate of a ‘universal republic of childhood’ nor commercial globalism, however, alters the fact that books for children have always been written by real authors at real places in different languages, and that they have been and still are read, in translations into other languages, in other parts of the world.