Interview with Zohar Shavit

Abstract

Zohar Shavit is a full professor in the School for Cultural Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. In 1978 she concluded her Ph.D under the supervision of Itamar Even-Zohar, with a dissertation on modernism in Hebrew poetry of the 1920s. Departing from the fundaments of Polysystems theory, the author has been presenting, since the 1980s, innovative reflexions in the field of children’s literature (CL), many of which regarding translation and international traffic of CL. Besides her best-known work, Poetics of Children's Literature (1986), Shavit has written an important group of academic articles and book chapters in which she deals with ambivalence in CL, with the need to formulate a poetics for its study, with the role of translations in the formation of Hebrew CL, with the phenomenon of cultural interference, with the canon.