Guest edited by CCY Professors Cheryl Cowdy and Alison Halsall, this issue reflects on the 2017 IRSCL Biennial Congress Theme, “Possible & Impossible Children: Children’s Literature & Childhood Studies.” This special issue prioritises perspectives on non-Anglo-American children’s literature and culture, as well as voices of scholars from varied national and ethnic backgrounds. These papers theorise new ways to think about and represent what it means to be a child, in different temporal periods and in varied transnational and transcultural contexts. In keeping with a new and important practice in childhood studies, some of the papers take as their focus actual children, incorporating young people’s voices into the overall argument, and thereby destabilizing the ‘difference model’ of childhood that stresses the ‘radical alterity or otherness of childhood’ (Marah Gubar 451).