Foreign Lands and Imagined Spaces: Orientalism in Children’s Fairy Tale Illustration from 1880-1930 in Europe and North America

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the “Golden Age of Illustration” in Europe and North America, a period identified by many scholars as one of unprecedented excellence in pictorial art published in books and magazines. This flourishing of illustrated texts at the turn of the twentieth century arose from industrialization, the emergence of easy and inexpensive color printing and advertising, and an emergent middle class who had the income and education to enjoy such works. However, many illustrators in the Golden Age also engaged in Orientalism, producing, reproducing, and constructing an imagined approximation of Near and Far Eastern landscapes and peoples. Fairy tale illustrators during this period reflected ideas and values that European and North American illustrators saw as significant to their understanding of Western culture. At the same time, their images indicated not (solely) an objectified Orient, but even questioned dominant ideas about Western cultural superiority. The examination of the diverse and at times contradictory messages produced in Orientalist Golden Age fairy tale illustrations demonstrates their rich analytical potential, their importance for understanding dominant cultural conceptions of the self and the Other, and the space left for further research to be done on the topic.