Imagology Meets Children's Literature

: Since the 1970s, children’s literature research has developed a number of approaches, from simple ideological criticism to more sophisticated applications of postcolonial theory, to analyse how, and to what end, members of other national, cultural, racial and ethnic groups are represented in texts for children. However, a field of study within comparative literature, imagology, which specifically addresses the cultural construction and literary representation of national characters in literature, has not yet made much impact on children’s literature. This review article will present its origins and methods of investigation as well as sketch areas in children’s literature of imagological interest, which have been or are still waiting to be productively addressed, to show what the domain can gain from this approach.

of the encyclopedia and geography book to populate the fictional adventure genres which dominated nineteenth and early twentieth-century children's literature.Today's multicultural literature, on the other hand, aims to reflect the ethnic and cultural diversity of many cities and countries.
As befits a journal dedicated to international children's literature research, the topic of national and cultural identity and its construction, as well as the representation of the 'other' in children's literature, has been a focus of articles in IRCL.In the first issue, Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg examined the depiction of national identity in two historical novels for children which address the same legend about the Danish flag in connection with the conquest of Estonia in the thirteenth-century.Focusing on representations of power and nationhood in Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906), Björn Sundermark showed in the following issue how Lagerlöf created a 'folkhem' in her text in which social classes, ethnic groups and linguistic differences are recruited to the cause of creating a sense of Swedish belonging and destiny.In the article 'Internationalism, Transculturalism and Globalisation', Anna Katrina Gutierrez explored the relationship between 'glocalisation' and the formation of national identity in picturebook retellings of four Philippine fairy tales from the Mga Kwento ni Lola Basyang series by Severino Reyes, and Marek Oziewicz (2010), examining works by Philip Pullman, Jonathan Stroud and J. K.
Rowling, revealed how the authors perpetuate 'Western politico-cultural superiority' in regard to Eastern Europeans (2).The development of what Michelle Superle (2010) calls a '"syncretic bicultural" identity' or the 'masala self' (131) of second-generation Indian youth in contemporary novels by diasporic Asian writers was discussed in a recent issue which also saw Evelyn Arizpe probing contemporary young adult adventure fiction set in Latin America to see how readers are positioned in relation to the Latin American image repertoire derived from colonial discourse about landscape, culture and inhabitants.
These thought-provoking articles, edited collections of articles on aspects of national identity (Webb 2000, Meek 2001) and book-length studies (Bradford 2001, Sands-O'Connor 2007) draw on a number of different discourses: postcolonial studies, multiculturalism, orientalism, globalism.However, one approach dedicated exclusively to the construction and representation of images of self and cultural other has, as yet, gone largely unnoticed by most children's literature scholars who address these images.i

Imagology
The term 'imagology', a technical neologism, ii applies to an approach rooted in comparative literature which researches the literary expression of mental images of the 'other' and of the 'self'.In a recent definition by Ton Hoenselaars and Joep Leerssen (2009), it is defined as follows: Imagology is based on, but not limited to, the inventory and typology of how nations are typified, represented, and/or caricatured in a given tradition or corpus of cultural articulations.On the basis of the analysis of texts or cultural artefacts, it raises questions about the mechanism of national/ethnic 'othering' and its underlying self-images.Questions raised concern the relation between 'character' and 'identity'; historical variability; genre, canonicity, and irony; and intermediality. (251) The origins of imagology are to be found in early twentieth century France where scholars were interested specifically in changes in the image of Germany and the Germans in French literature and how these were influenced by the social and historical context.In his programmatic article 'Imagology: History and Method', Leerssen lists four basic assumptions of imagology which position it specifically as a branch of literary studies.The first is that it 'furnishes continuous proof that it is in the field of imaginary and poetical literature that national stereotypes are first and most effectively formulated, perpetuated and disseminated' (26).The second assumption is that images work 'primarily because of their intertextual tropicality [... ], the primary reference is not to empirical reality but to an intertext, a sounding-board, of other related textual instances' (26).The third assumption is that literary sources, due to their long currency and topicality, perpetuate images over time.This assumption can, of course, only apply to texts with a certain degree of canonicity.The fourth and final assumption is that literature is a 'privileged genre for the dissemination of stereotypes, because it often works on the presupposition of a "suspension of disbelief" and some (at least aesthetic) appreciative credit among the audience' (26).These are the four factors which give imagology its raison d'être.
In the same article Leerssen goes on to list what he calls imagology's 'methodological assumptions' (26).While not strictly a methodology (he interestingly uses the harder term 'methodological' as qualifier for the softer noun 'assumptions'), they are nonetheless a first structured formulation of the principles of imagological investigation and therefore merit presentation in some detail.
1.The first of these is that the ultimate perspective of image studies is a theory of cultural or national stereotypes, not a theory of cultural or national identity: 'the imagologist's frame of reference is a textual and intertextual one' ( 27).Imagology's aim is to understand a discourse of representation rather than a society.
2. As the nationality represented '(the spected)' is always reflected in the perspective of the representing text or discourse '(the spectant)', imagologists are particularly interested in the dynamics between 'those images which characterize the Other (hetero-images) and those which characterize one's own domestic identity (selfimages or auto-images)' (27).

Imagology differentiates between statements of fact such as 'France is a republic'
and what Leerssen calls 'imaginated discourse' (28) such as 'the French are freedomloving individuals'.Generally, imaginated discourse 'singles out a nation from the rest of humanity as being somehow different or "typical", and […] articulates or suggests a moral collective-psychological motivation for given social or national features' (28).
Imagology is therefore specifically concerned with 'the characterological explanation' of cultural difference.5.After establishing its tradition, the imagologist must contextualize the trope within the text of its occurrence to allow for the different generic conventions and techniques which are deployed in the different types of fictional, narrative, poetic, dramatic, visual and so on texts.The textual deployment of a given image can only be adequately accessed when there is an awareness of genre-specific poetical conventions, (narrative) techniques and conventions.
6. Of vital importance, of course, is historical contextualization, as literary texts are neither produced nor can they be interpreted in a 'timeless, aesthetic never-never-land' (28).
7. A pragmatic perspective, which so far has been urged although not much work has been done in the area, asks about the text's target audience.This is of central importance for a literature defined by its audience such as children's literature.It asks 'How is its rhetoric and deployment of national tropes geared to this target audience?Is there any evidence concerning the text's reception and impact?' (28) 8.A further perspective which Leerssen sketches involves investigating the nature of the dynamics which may cause images to shift between contrasting modalities and opposing valorisations such as the mutation of Germans from poet-philosophers to tyrannical technocrats or Irish from mindlessly violent to poetically sentimental.9. Beyond the self-other dynamics of setting domestic culture off against another lies a further function of images to be investigated: their role in the process of creating or maintaining a sense of selfhood through historical remembrance and cultural memory.This is of particular relevance in the field of children's literature.10.Finally, Leerssen stresses the comparative nature of the study of national images because it 'addresses cross-national relations rather than national identities' (29).
When studied as a multi-national phenomenon, certain patterns of national characterization become apparent.Leerssen himself has identified certain imaginated moral-characterological oppositions which are nationally unspecific and can be encountered in different contexts: 'Northern-cerebral vis-à-vis southern-sensuous, peripheral-timeless vis-à-vis central-modern, or western-individualistic-active vis-àvis oriental-collective-passive' (29).From these patterns, Leerssen extrapolates that our way of thinking in terms of national characters 'boils down to an ethnic-political distribution of role patterns in an imaginated anthropological landscape' (29).He rightly concludes his article on the history and method of imagology with this perspective saying that it is in this aspect that imagology holds out a challenge and a promise for future research.
In summary: intercultural relations in terms of mutual perceptions of nations or cultural groups, images and self-images and their representation in literature is imagology's traditional subject.Modern image studies investigates the ways in which an image and its historical context are expressed in texts rather than its pretended reference to empirical reality; instead of asking, 'Were the Spanish/French/Chinese really like that?' it asks, 'How are they portrayed and why?'.Imagology observes the context of contemporary history as well as conventions of discourse, such as intertextuality, asking 'Where do images come from, why and how are these ones being used in this particular text at this point in time?'It examines 'the complex links between literary discourse on the one hand and national identity-constructs on the other' (Leerssen 2000: 270).As a critical theory of and transnational cultural history approach to national stereotypes, it looks beyond snapshots of how one nation or ethnical group is portrayed, say, in contemporary fiction, to aim for a larger scale historical contextualisation and examination of tropical traditions as well as considering patterns, the 'grammar' of cross-cultural representation (Leerssen 1997: 294).
Imagology is a text-based discipline; its object is mental images and their representation in language, but it has, as yet, paid little attention to material images, to visual representations.The pre-eminence of the written, literary word can be seen as a legacy from imagology having had to defend its legitimacy as a field of literary studies.Today, when the representation of cultures is increasingly becoming the privilege of the visual media, imagology cannot afford to ignore them.Children's literature research, which addresses hybrid and multimodal forms -especially picturebooks with their multiple variations of interaction between verbal and visual elements -, can make a significant contribution to imagology by showing how the analysis of this rich corpus of combined verbal and visual topoi can contribute to the general study of the representation of cultures.

Imagology and Children's Literature
Children's literature is a particularly rich seam for research in imagology, since in it a culture's identity is formulated.It provides young readers with their earliest images of a world into which they are gradually venturing, as well as the vocabularies they need to read that world.Children's literature is the branch of literature read and shared by the greatest numbers of members of most communities and a sanctioned location of communication about what it means to belong to that specific group.In this respect it functions as a reservoir for the collective memory of a nation.As a site for tradition of information, beliefs, and customs, it overtly or latently reflects dominant social and cultural norms, including self-images and images of others.It has a key function in establishing selfhood for its target audience of children, and also in the maintenance of selfhood for the adults who produce, disseminate, and co-read the texts.However, children's literature is one of the least researched corpora in comparative imagology and children's literature research has, with few exceptions, iii paid little attention to this approach.
Early studies on images in children's literature rarely went beyond simple thematological inventorizing of characteristics ascribed to certain groups, ignoring 'the complex links between literary discourse, on the one hand, and national identity constructs on the other' (Leerssen 2000: 270).The 1970s saw a growing awareness of and challenge to Eurocentric bias and expressions of racial of ethnic prejudice in children's literature.Extreme forms of this criticism under the banner of 'political correctness' produced questionable results such as the banning of the rhyme 'Baa baa black sheep' on racial grounds from nurseries and primary schools.The portrayal of African Americans, of Africans, of the 'Third World' generally and of migrant workers were popular subjects of surveys on 'discrimination', 'prejudice ' and 'racism' in children's literature (cf. Dixon 1977, Becker 1977, Renschler & Preiswerk 1981).The German study published by Marieluise Christadler in 1978 on militarization in children's literature in Germany and France before 1914 heralded a differentiated approach to image studies in children's literature, showing how reciprocal images in the children's literature of France and Germany were used as propaganda to mobilize the youth on the eve of the First World War.
In Comparative Children's Literature, the first English-language monograph on comparative approaches to children's books, Emer O'Sullivan identifies image studies as one of nine constituent areas of comparative children's literature and provides a brief account of research in the area.iv

Configuration of Specific 'Foreigners/Others' in Children's Literature
This is the area most covered in children's literature studies, and studies range from traditional 'theme and motif' studies which merely categorize and catalogue the occurrence of one cultural group or nation in the literature of another, to more sophisticated investigations which probe the ideological fabric of the texts.The portrayal of the Native American, for instance, or Asian cultures are popular topics in multicultural approaches (see Monroe 1997); some of these are written from a decidedly ideologically critical perspective (Maddy & MacCann 2008).There are numerous accounts of the representation of individual nations, regions or ethnic groups in German children's literature alone, for instance on Turkey (Grenz 1996), the Soviet Union (Eberlein 1991), Africans (Attikpoe 2003) or 'gypsies' (Briel 1989).
Potential shortcomings of approaches which focus on a single group or nation include particularism: seen in isolation, connections or parallels between the representation of that particular spected and others in the literature of the spectant cannot be recognised.A further shortcoming may lie in the scope of the period covered by the corpus: often the historical variability of representation is not considered because the analysis only provides a snapshot of images current during a limited (often contemporary) era.The final shortcoming is when the question of stereotypes is regarded in isolation from other discursive levels in the text.A study which avoided these shortcomings in an exemplary manner was the major imagological study undertaken at Leipzig University, which took a historical approach and addressed the representation of all foreigners in German children's literature -both in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany -between 1945 and 2000.The extensive publication (Weinkauff & Seifert) which covers more than 1,000 pages and draws on a database exceeding 8,000 primary texts addresses the depiction of distant cultures (America, Latin America, Asia and Africa) as well as those closer to Europe in order to examine the changing perception and portrayal of otherness over the period of half a century, also taking into account the role of cultural transfer.Specifically working within the context of imagology, this multi-faceted study compares and reflects differences on the diachronic level, registering a reduction in the degree of exoticism used in the representation of foreign cultures over time, as well as on the synchronic level, comparing, for instance, the role and function of the adventure novel in the German Democratic Republic with its counterpart in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The study illustrates how productive a combined diachronic and multinational approach (in terms of the spected) can be, because it identifies shifts in relative status of nations or cultures at given times in a manner not possible in a bilateral study (A in the literature of B), as well as the cultural and political reasons for the dominance of literatures in transfer in a specific country at a particular time.

Culture-Specific Topographies
How textual and visual representations of cultural, national or regional identity are linked with the landscape has been examined by scholars such as Reinbert Tabbert who, focusing specifically on auto-images, examines the dominance and significance of certain aspects of the environment in children's literature of different cultures; they include the forest in German books, the garden in English ones, the Alps in Swiss ones and the outback in Australian children's literature ('Nationale Mythen', 'Umweltmythen').In his taxonomy of the landscapes of Australian picturebooks, John Stephens (1995) points out that the aspect that most clearly differentiates the literature of one country from that of another is a 'sense of place' (97), with representations of landscape functioning as metonyms for social significance or cultural heritage.He underscores the relationship between topography and ideology when he writes that what is depicted can be regarded as a 'correspondence between external and internal realities as per-ceived by a society at a particular cultural moment, with the further implication that consumers will internalize the representation and its accompanying myths' (99).The role of landscape in English and Icelandic literature for children (Pálsdóttir 2000), its importance for national identity formation in Switzerland (Rutschmann 1994), the reconstruction of the English homeland (Watkins 1995), and the topographical imagery of the Shtetl in American narratives of migration (Pohl 2005) are further examples of work in this area.0

Functions of Images: Extra Textual and Poetological
Images of foreign nations and cultures may be used in literature to instil a sense of national identity in the process of socialisation and take such extreme forms as propaganda, usually produced by means of contrast.The foreign element acts as a foil against which the domestic identity appears more clearly, most often more favourably.Images were used in historical novels for young people in Switzerland to promote national consciousness as well as the virtues of citizenship and economy beyond the boundaries of the four linguistic areas of the country (Rutschmann).How images of 'otherness' in the children's literature of France and Germany were used as tools for purposes of wartime propaganda was shown by Christadler.
Familiar images of certain nations belong to what Umberto Eco (1979) has called 'common frames' and 'intertextual frames' (20) in literature.These intertextually recognizable stereotypes can be regarded as a kind of 'literary shorthand' (O'Sullivan 1989: 57) which triggers an extensively preprogrammed actualization of associations, investing them with a special aesthetic potential.Although imagology has always acknowledged the poetological dimension of images it has seldom directly addressed their potentially different literary functions.As studies undertaken by O'Sullivan at the end of the 1980s illustrated, national stereotypes can be regarded as a backdrop in front of which each description of another nation is written and read; it is against this that authors can realize their aesthetic potential.Images can be brought into play to fulfil expectations and affirm current stereotypes; they can be used to contradict expectations, or deliberately omitted where they would have been anticipated.Authors can make stereotypes thematic, subvert them in a playful manner, or give them an imminent narrative function in the work.An example of the latter can be found in Jan Needle's Albeson and the Germans (1977), in which the common Nazi stereotypes are functionalized to become an intrinsic part of the narrative.v

Constancy and Change in the Representation of Others
A study to determine which aspects in the images of other nations remain constant and which change along with changing historical and political circumstances, as well as how the valorization of characteristics change over time can only be undertaken with a corpus which covers a significant length of time.In a diachronic study of British children's fiction with a German theme published between 1870 and 1990 and covering some 250 primary texts, O' Sullivan (1990) traced the interdependence of political and cultural relations between the two nations, showing how, for example, the depiction of Germans in texts 1 with a specific time setting -for example the Second World War -varied according to the date of publication.While portrayals of Germans in all texts published before 1960 with this time setting were predominantly negative, a shift can be observed around 1970, after which point in time, even though the Germans remain the enemies in the period in which the action is set, a more differentiated approach to the representation can be observed, which allows for neutral or even positive representations of individual German characters (a famous example is Robert Westall's The Machine-Gunners [1975]).The same study traces the valorization of the stereotype of 'the musical German' over a period of over 100 years, showing how it aligns itself to the evolution of the image of the gentle, family-loving and benign German of the first third of the nineteenth century, to the brutal, overpowering, cruel Prussian German of the two World Wars.In this shift is mirrored one of the structural factors involved in national characterization, that of weak versus strong.As Leerssen (2000) noted: 'Images of powerful nations will foreground the ruthlessness and cruelty which are associated with effective power, whilst weak nations can count either on the sympathy felt for the underdog or else on that benevolent exoticism which can only flourish under the proviso of condescension' (276 f).Patterns of this nature can only be established on the basis of diachronic studies of extensive corpora; they are a desideratum for future imagological studies in children's literature to complement 'snapshot' impressions of images current at one point in time only.

Migration
Migration in literature is most frequently discussed in the context of multiculturalism in contemporary literature.In a recent study, Jana Pohl works within the framework of imagology to examine a historical migration situation -that of the mass migration of East European Jews to the USA between 1881 and 1924 -and how it is presented in contemporary North American children's literature.The literary depiction of a historical movement and how it is positioned in the collective memory is at the centre of her analysis.The portrayal of Eastern Europe as region of origin and the target country America are juxtaposed, and the poetological functions of the 'American Dream' examined.The questions she asks include: 'How are Russia and America represented verbally and visually and how does the American perspective relate to these representations?Are the images of the country of origin and the target country used as literary device and employed for aesthetic purposes?When cultural difference of the country of origin and the target culture is reconstructed retrospectively, what is remembered and what is forgotten?What collective story of Jewish migration emerges in theses texts?' (Looking forward ).Pohl reveals how the double perspective: the notional representations of such groups formed by the imagination (the subject of imagology) and how they are expressed in the material images of the picturebook.Despite the terminological affinity between the mental images studied by imagology and material images, scant attention has been paid to the entire area of the visual arts or the media by imagology.Some work in children's literature research has addressed the representation of place, culture or national identity in picturebooks, with varying degrees of analysis of the actual iconography (see Stephens 1995, Bradford 1995, McCallum 1997, Moebius 2000, Christiansen 2000, Lampert 2008, Pohl Looking forward ).Children's literature with its various corpora of visual and verbal texts from the eighteenth century to the present is a hugely rich but relatively untapped seam for research in imagology; imagology as a critical theory of and transnational cultural history approach to national cultural and ethnical images is incomplete if it fails to consider children's literature's socializing and multi-modal corpora and the discipline's analytical approach towards them.
When imagology meets children's literature, both fields stand to gain.
However, this nascent branch of comparative studies was dismissed by René Wellek in his lecture 'The Crisis of Comparative Literature' in 1958 when, with the question 'It may be all very well to hear what conceptions Frenchmen had about Germany or about England -but is such a study still literary scholarship?' (1963: 284), he brushed aside imagological studies as being extrinsic to the proper concern of comparative literary criticism, seeing in it nothing but national psychology, sociology, and 'Stoffgeschichte' under a different name.In the face of this dismissive view, Hugo Dyserinck, professor of comparative literature in Aachen, continued to develop imagology from the late 1960s on, focusing on both the intrinsic literary function and the general ideological importance of national images.Within the framework of European Studies at Amsterdam University, Joep Leerssen, a former student of Dyserinck's and now one of the leading scholars in the area, established the historical study of the interaction between the discourse and the political invocation of national characters and their rhetorical representation in literary texts.Since the end of the 1980s, work on orientalism, postcolonialism, the study of alterity and the history of mentalities has moved literary representation of what is 'foreign' and 'other' to the centre of cultural and literary studies.Hand in hand with the general rise of interest in cultural stereotyping and identity constructs goes a new interest in imagology itself.As an approach, it precedes these more recent ones, but it has also benefited from them.Together with Manfred Beller, Leerssen edited the seminal handbook Imagology.The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; it, and the special issue of the European Journal of English Studies on 'The Rhetoric of National Character', are strong indicators of the renewed interest in this field of comparative literature.

4 .
When examining a literary text, the first task of an imagologist is to establish the intertext of a given national representation as trope.He/she then has to investigate the tradition of the trope as well as traditions of its appreciation or depreciation.Only with an awareness of the tradition can the critic examine how a trope is actually deployed in the text, to what extent it is echoed or reinforced, varied upon, negated, made thematic, ignored, or even made fun of by the individual text in question (cf 28 and O'Sullivan 1989).

A
diachronic examination of how representatives of different nations are portrayed in picturebooks over an extended period of time which traces tropes and intermediality in the visual text, intertextuality in the verbal text, as well as forms of the interaction between the elements, is still a desideratum of children's literature research and imagology.In a first publication of a research project at Lüneburg University which investigates panoramic accounts of representatives of several nations (represented by children, adults, dolls, or toys) in English and German picturebooks (ABC books, fictitious journeys around the world and so on), O'Sullivan (2009) examines how these representatives are portrayed in picturebooks written for the amusement of young readers.It takes into account their composite nature in an analysis which addresses the iconography of the visual representation of national character, its verbal construction and the interplay of the textual and the pictorial.