Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment

Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books

Boekcover van Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment

Recently, Palgrave Macmillan has published 'Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment. Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books', the new book by Assistant Professor in Early Modern Dutch Literature Feike Dietz.

Dr. Feike Dietz
Dr Feike Dietz

Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment

This book explores how children’s literature and literacy could at once regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Through an analysis of a wide range of books for children in their national and international literary-historical contexts, it suggests that we view the history of childhood as a continuous struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people.

The volume demonstrates how the struggle for agency 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.

 

  • Title: Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment. Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-Century Children's Books
  • Author: Feike Dietz
  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
  • ISBN: 9783030696337