The Play World

“A valuable intervention in the historiography of German childhood and play. Simpson’s argument has tremendous sweep: exploring changes in childhood and parenting over centuries, the role of play in child development, the deployment of racial and imperial images, the circulation of images and toys across the Atlantic, and the decline of German influence on images of childhood in the twentieth century.”

—David Hamlin German History

“The Play World is an engaging read with a compelling argument about the unique contribution of German arts and letters—through toys, children’s literature, and pedagogical texts—that offers a new understanding of the role of play in modern childhood.”

—Maureen O. Gallagher German Studies Review

“Simpson not only breaks ground for the critical study of the role of play and toys in the formation of modern German and American culture, paying special attention to the 18th and 19th centuries, but she also resists the lure of an easy narrative. Instead, her book reminds us how complicated, conflicted, and barely progressive this story of play and toys was.”

—Willi Goetschel The Germanic Review

“Simpson’s book is a welcome addition to discussions of 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, the 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

“Within the burgeoning scholarship on play and the material culture of childhood, Simpson’s The Play World stands out through its attention to a breathtaking range of texts and artifacts that lie at the margins of the canon; its brilliantly eclectic methodology (combining literary, material, and intellectual history with postcolonial studies, critical race theory, gender studies, disability studies, and much more); and its ability to illuminate complex cultural and commercial currents that connect German-speaking Europe with Africa, Great Britain, and the Americas from the seventeenth century to WWI. It’s a remarkable book that will resonate within and beyond the field of childhood studies.”

—Elliott Schreiber, co-editor of Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800

“[A] fascinating read for scholars of the transatlantic world, of Germany, and of parenting, and it importantly cements German imperialism not as a fact to be debated but as clearly constitutive of familial and (trans)national identities.”

—Amanda M. Brian H-Transnational German Studies