We are inundated with game play today. Digital devices offer opportunities to play almost anywhere and anytime. No matter our age, gender, social, cultural, or educational background--we play. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 is the first book-length work to explore how the modern discourse of play was first shaped during this pivotal period (approximately 1770-1830). The eleven chapters illuminate critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play as evident in the work of major authors of the period including Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Pestalozzi, Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Schleiermacher, and Fr bel. While drawing on more recent theories of play by thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott, Jost Trier, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Henricks, and Patrick Jagoda, the volume shows the debates around play in German letters of this period to be far richer and more complex than previously thought, as well as more relevant for our current engagement with play. Indeed, modern debates about what constitutes good rather than bad practices of play can be traced to these foundational discourses.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Industry Reviews
"Play in the Age of Goethe is a brilliantly conceived and edited volume that explores the topic of "play" with a view to both its historical development and its contemporary importance. While canonical authors receive their due, the essays likewise address domains of research not usually treated in literary historical studies. Theory and practice are skillfully blended and the various perspectives represented in the essays are mutually enhancing. The contributions fully realize the intention of the volume to make clear how rich and various, how intellectually compelling and fecund the thoughts about and fictional treatments of play in the German--speaking lands at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in fact were." -- David E. Wellbery * author of The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism *
"This is a superb collection of essays on a topic of central interest to scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, as well as students of continental philosophy and theoreticians of play. The introduction is lively and intriguing, setting the stage for the essays to come and maintaining interest via a very concise, yet wide-ranging account of the importance of play and games in contemporary life and what is at stake in the practice." -- Gail K. Hart * author of Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetic, and the Poetics of Punishment *
"This collection's strength is evident in the care each author takes with the theme, material, and development of what amount to multiple interlocking frameworks for understanding play circa 1800." * Monatshefte *
"[A] stimulating introduction to a complex topic." * Lessing Yearbook, 2023 *
"[Play in the Age of Goethe] is another impressive work in the series New Studies in the Age of Goethe and clearly demonstrates the productivity of scholars in the field and their many interdisciplinary connections." * Goethe Yearbook, 2023 *
"This collection's strength is evident in the care each author takes with the theme, material, and development of what amount to multiple interlocking frameworks for understanding play circa 1800." * Monatshefte *
"Play in the Age of Goethe is a brilliantly conceived and edited volume that explores the topic of 'play' with a view to both its historical development and its contemporary importance. While canonical authors receive their due, the essays likewise address domains of research not usually treated in literary historical studies. Theory and practice are skillfully blended and the various perspectives represented in the essays are mutually enhancing. The contributions fully realize the intention of the volume to make clear how rich and various, how intellectually compelling and fecund the thoughts about and fictional treatments of play in the German--speaking lands at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries in fact were." -- David E. Wellbery * author of The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism *
"This is a superb collection of essays on a topic of central interest to scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture, as well as students of continental philosophy and theoreticians of play. The introduction is lively and intriguing, setting the stage for the essays to come and maintaining interest via a very concise, yet wide-ranging account of the importance of play and games in contemporary life and what is at stake in the practice." -- Gail K. Hart * author of Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetic, and the Poetics of Punishment *
