The Virtue of Play: Games and Stories for Children in Three Pedagogical Texts of the Enlightenment

Abstract

My essay both substantiates and complicates the widespread conception that children's literature of the Enlightenment consistently tethers entertainment to a didactic or moral goal. I do so through an analysis of two prominent German works of the period by Johann Bernhard Basedow and Johann Gottlieb Schummel. Like John Locke, their primary inspiration, Basedow and Schummel each make play integral to their texts, and they each regard stories as an extension of play. Unlike Locke, however, they each also incisively challenge their own teleological approach to play, thereby setting the stage for the innovations of Romanticism.