It’s a Small World: Stories from Everywhere Else
This exhibition is primarily focused on the history of children’s literature in the Western world: Britain, Western Europe, and the United States. But every culture has its stories, and people have gathered and published those stories for the children, just as the Grimms and Perrault did for the fairy tales of Europe. Here’s a small sample of traditional tales from other parts of the world.
Hirendra Narayana Mukhopadhyaya. Mani Kundala. Kalikata; Dhaka: Brndabana Dhara, 1352 [1945]. Stories from Indic lore and literature. In Bengali.
Lafcadio Hearn. “Chin Chin Kobakama.” Japanese Fairy Tales. No. 25. Tokyo: T. Hasegawa, 1903. In English.
Hearn, an Irish/Greek-American journalist, became so enamored of Japan while on a writing assignment that he stayed, married a Japanese woman, and took a new name for himself: Koizumi Yakumo. His adaptations of Japanese folk and fairy tales gave many Westerners their first exposure to these stories. The series was printed on small crepe paper volumes with hand-colored woodcut illustrations.
Embla Ýr Bárudóttir. Vetrarvíg: sögur úr Njálu. Reykjavik: Mál og menning, 2005. In Icelandic.
Njáls saga is one of the Icelandic prose sagas, medieval histories that became the basis of Iceland’s literary tradition. Tolkien was influenced by the sagas, among other sources, in writing his Lord of the Rings series.
Huiguan Chen. Chen Huiguan xin hui quan ben Xi you ji. Shanghai: Shanghai gu ji chu ban she, 2001. In Chinese.
The classical Chinese epic novel Journey to the West tells the story of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a mercurial and powerful figure in Chinese mythology.
O Chŏng-hŭi kŭl. Chŏptongsae iyagi. Wŏn Hye-yŏng kŭrim. Sŏul-si : Igasŏ, 2006. In Korean.
Nicholasa Mohr y Antonio Martorell. La canción del coquí y otros cuentos de Puerto Rico. New York : Viking, 1995. In Spanish.
Léopold Senghor and Abdoulaye Sadji. La Belle Histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre: Cours Élémentaire des Écoles d’Afrique Noire. Paris : Hachette, 1953.
Poet, scholar, and first President of the Republic of Senegal, somehow Léopold Senghor found time to put together this collection of West African folktales for teaching French in elementary schools.