Introduction

The study of children's literature as literature may be understood within the broader context of societal de-hierarchization, a phenomenon evolving from the mid-1960s and accelerating in the later decades of the twentieth century, especially in the global north. Interdisciplinarity also received a strong impetus from the emergence of childhood studies in the 1990s, a field that creates bridges among all disciplines that have studied children's literature, inviting conversations between the social sciences and humanities involved in the study of childhood. Contesting the monopoly of the canon on research and teaching also created room for children’s literature. Initially, as work by Zohar Shavit and Maria Nikolajeva (among others) has shown, literary scholars were heavily invested in elevating the status of children’s literature to a mode of literature in its own right, admittedly different from, but not necessarily less than, literature for adult readers.