The Play World chronicles the history and evolution of the concept of play as a universal part of childhood. Examining texts and toys coming out of Europe between 1631 and 1914, Patricia Anne Simpson argues that German material, literary, and pedagogical cultures were central to the construction of the modern ideas and realities of play and childhood in the transatlantic world.
With attention to the details of toy manufacturing and marketing, Simpson considers prescriptive texts about how children should play, treat their possessions, and experience adventure in the scientific exploration of distant geographies. She illuminates the role of toys, among them a mechanical guillotine, yoyos, hybridized dolls, and circus figures, as agents of history. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws from postcolonial, childhood, and migration studies, she makes the case that these texts and toys transfer the world of play into a space in which model childhoods are imagined and enacted as German. With chapters on the Protestant play ethic, enlightened parenting, Goethe as an advocate of play, colonial fantasies, children’s almanacs, ethnographic play, and an empire of toys, Simpson’s argument follows a compelling path toward understanding the reproduction of religious, gendered, ethnic, racial, national, and imperial identities emanating from German-speaking Europe, which collectively construct a global imaginary.
This foundational and deeply original study connects German-speaking communities across the Atlantic as they collectively engender the epistemology of the play world. It will be of particular interest to German studies scholars whose research crosses the Atlantic.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood
1. The Protestant Play Ethic
2. Professional Parenting: Enlightened Play
3. Revolutions in Play
4. Colonizing Childhoods: The African Imaginary
5. Ethnographic Play and the American Imaginary
6. The Home and the Nation
7. Empire of Toys
Conclusion: “A Very Brilliant House”
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“Simpson’s book is a welcome addition to discussions on the importance of the domestic sphere and its artifacts and practices for questions of cultural nationalism and transnational interplays. It shows the impact of toys and play on narratives of migration, articulation of middle-class subjectivity and the role of model childhoods in the self-identity of modern European family structures, and how they influenced European American family structures in their acquisition of racial, ethnic, and national regimes.”
—Karin A. Wurst, author of Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780-1830
