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Empire and Children’s Literature: Changing Patterns of Cross-Cultural Perspective

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Abstract

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “Foreign Children,” Rudyard Kipling’s poem “We and They,” and Frances Temple’s youth novel The Beduins’ Gazelle are the texts submitted to detailed analysis in this article, which examines cross-cultural perspectives in relation to imperial and post-imperial social contexts. Stevenson is shown to portray the basic structure of an imperial cross-cultural perspective, which Kipling problematizes and calls into question. Analysis of Temple reveals her awareness of the problems and limitations that inhere in an imperial perspective and shows that her work presents innovative, contemporary approaches to the representation of cross-cultural perspectives.

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Correspondence to Don Randall.

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Don Randall is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), where he began teaching in 1999. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1995, and subsequently was awarded two postdoctoral fellowships, at The University of Calgary (1996–1997) and at Queen’s University at Kingston (1997–1999). His main research areas are postcolonial literature and British imperial literature. He has published numerous articles and is the author of two books: Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (Palgrave, 2000) and David Malouf (Manchester University Press, 2007).

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Randall, D. Empire and Children’s Literature: Changing Patterns of Cross-Cultural Perspective. Child Lit Educ 41, 28–39 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-009-9094-z

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