Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

As part of the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 2019-2020 Speaker Series: Print, Power, and Parable in Japanese Literature, Melek Ortabasi of Simon Fraser University will present this talk.

World literature is what happens when literary works travel from their point of origin. How does children’s literature behave differently from “adult” literature when it moves among and across borders? This lecture will examine three influential and highly regarded children’s “classics” – all written over a century ago – and trace their journeys to Japan. American “girls’ books” writer Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868); former soldier and popular Italian travelogue writer Edmondo De Amici’s Cuore (Heart, 1886); and Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf’s Nils Holgerssons underbara resa (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1907) were wildly popular at home and abroad. Through a comparative analysis of these works and their translations into Japanese, we will discover how these works of world children’s literature also became “classics” for Japanese children.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); Japan Foundation; and the Asian Studies Development Fund.

For more information, visit the website.