'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early
history of Dutch children's literature, pedagogical developments and
emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz's study will be
essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and
children's books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.'
-- Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK.
'A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated
discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to
transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide
international context and masterfully connects this process to the
radical politicization and de-politicization of Dutch society in the
revolutionary period.'
--Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, formerly of Utrecht University, the Netherlands,
and the
University of California at Los Angeles, USA.
This book explores how children's literature and literacy could at once
regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch
Republic. Rather than presenting the history of childhood as a linear
story of increasing agency, it suggests that we view it as a continuous
struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people. This
volume demonstrates how this struggle informed the production of books
in a historical context in which the development of independent youths
was high on the political agenda. In close interaction with
international children's literature markets, Dutch authors developed new
strategies to make the members of young generations into capable readers
and writers, equipped to organize their own minds and bodies properly,
and to support a supposedly declining fatherland.
