Chapter 15 The Children’s Literature Scholar as a Two-Headed Creature (Lofting and Damrosch)
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Abstract
This concluding chapter presents the main contradictions in academic research on children’s literature, presently brought to the fore in the conflict between the local and particular on the one hand, and the general and widespread on the other, as well as the tension between world and global literature. Those contrasts translate into an opposition between the standpoint of the researcher as an interpreter of singular works and their role to isolate tendencies in the world literary market. The chapter follows David Damrosch’s metaphorical employment of Hugh Lofting’s fantastical concept of a two-headed creature as a symbol of striving in two directions at once, which might represent the scholar of children’s literature faced with contradictions: to reconcile the micro and macro scale, and to classify and evaluate at the same time. The chapter closes by positing a mode of interpretation from a multicultural perspective, and encouraging the development of self-critical meta-reflections on how we approach an everchanging research subject.