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 Fröbel. 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. 

EDGAR LANDGRAF is a professor of German at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He studied philosophy and literary theory in Zurich, Chicago, and Baltimore. In addition to play studies, his research interests include: critical improvisation studies; German Romanticism; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, aesthetics, and philosophy; sociological approaches to literature; neo-cybernetics, posthumanism, and Nietzsche.

ELLIOTT SCHREIBER is an associate professor of German studies at Vassar College in New York. He is author of The Space of Autonomy: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Topography of Modernity, as well as articles on numerous authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently at work on a book that investigates the rise of the discourse of imaginative play in Enlightenment and Romantic pedagogy, and its development through the genre of the German literary fairy tale.

— Gail K. Hart, author of Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetic, and the Poetics of Punishment

“[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

— David E. Wellbery, author of The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism

“[A] stimulating introduction to a complex topic."— Lessing Yearbook, 2023

— Monatshefte