[Excerpt] Spaces, texts and playthings for children are engaged in both looking back and looking forward; they are nostalgic, sometimes reparative and often aspirational. For scholars and historians, that simultaneity is insistently present in material artefacts, particularly ones that have been played with until, like the Velveteen Rabbit, their fur has rubbed off, their seams are visible, and bits are missing. As a scholar of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century board and table games, I have handled delicate materials that were roughly and enthusiastically grasped by their original child owners. As a scholar I ask myself: what we can learn about the past by studying them? As a professor, I also ask: can understanding the power of games inform how my students will frame play for the next generation? And how can play shape their own futures?
- Gaming life from 1790 to the 2000s
- Megan A. Norcia
- Hannah Field (Editor)Seth Giddings (Editor)Ben Highmore (Editor)
- Playthings and Playtimes, pp.155-174
- UCL Press
- 99385729575206570
- Scholarly Innovation & Student Research; Department of Language & Literature
- English
- Book chapter