The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood
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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, yo-yos, 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, that 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.
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Patricia Anne Simpson is Professor of German Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and coeditor of the Goethe Yearbook. She is the author of several books, including most recently Reimagining the European Family: Cultures of Immigration.
