Cinderella and Her Sisters

Abstract

The problem of Flemish children's literature, typical of a minor cultural community or a dominated system, can serve as a model for other cultural systems that find themselves in an unequal relationship with an allied but stronger system. Minor cultures like the Flemish, which has such a relationship with the Dutch culture, have a limited readership for their children's books, as these are seldom translated and, hence, never gain international fame. However, they still need a history of their own production. In order to construct a realistic picture of that production, therefore, it is important to see how and why these cultures are dominated by more forceful ones. Historiography has been discussed extensively during the second half of this century, and parties to this discussion are united in their uneasiness regarding the shortcomings of traditional methods and existing theories. The hitherto unassailable belief in the reconstruction of the past through the gathering of facts, names, and other data has given way to a new approach which views history as an adaptation or construction (see Newton-Smith 1981; Jauss 1967; Schmidt 1985; Ort 1985; Rusch 1985). With regard to the historiography of children's literature, particularly that of a minor culture, even the most basic data are often incomplete. In these cases, selection and combination of the data become major problems, as selection is conditioned primarily by the availability of data. Texts pertaining to the field of children's literature, as well as bibliographical information and reception documents, are often lost