Sanne Parlevliet

Bring up the Children: National and Religious Identity and Identification in Dutch Children's Historical Novels 1848-c.1870.

Historical fiction is a powerful way of transmitting national history to later generations. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a means of building identity and fostering solidarity. This article investigates Dutch historical novels for children. First, it explores the relation between educational ideas and historical novels for children, distinguishing between two groups of children’s novels: novels written in the spirit of ideas on national non-denominational education and novels opposing Christian neutrality in education, by glorifying orthodox Protestantism and inculcating combativeness and intolerance. Second, the literary strategies employed to relate history are analysed. Both groups of novels use the same strategies, such as fictional characters as figures of identification, narrators mediating between the present and the past, and restructuring the past in favour of a triumphant ending to the story. However, there is a striking difference in character development.

Daily Chicken: The Cultural Transmission of Bourgeois Family Values in Adaptations of Literary Classics for Children, 1850-1950

Literature is a significant agent in the transmission of culture. Through literature expected behavior and patterns of life are passed on from generation to generation. The anticipated power of children’s literature is even stronger. Socializing the target audience has always been one of its main aims. Consequently, books for children are governed by dominant social, cultural, and educational norms. This article explores the reciprocity between cultural transmission and the transmission of literature. It examines adaptations of international literary classics in their capacity of cultural intermediaries between old masterpieces and young audiences. Focusing on ways of transmitting family ideologies to children, the repository of Dutch adaptations of Reynard the fox, Till Eulenspiegel, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s travels serves as a case study.

Remediating history: assessing the past in Dutch historical fiction for children c. 1960–1980

Abstract Historical fiction is a powerful way of transmitting national history to later generations. It emerged in the nineteenth century as a means of building identity and fostering solidarity. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, former representations of history were deconstructed. Instead of glorifying the nation, social evils were exposed. As a consequence of this, western European histories of children’s literature claim a shift in children’s books from an emphasis on political to social history. Historical heroes and triumphs were replaced by accounts of the lives of common people and how they were touched by great events. This article investigates the influence of this changed perception and representation of history on images of nationality in Dutch historical children’s books. Two groups are identified: a group of books that are critical of historical practices and events, focus on the lives of common people, and project emancipatory ideals on historical characters; and a group of books that transmit a conventional image of the past which was introduced in former periods, in which nation-building and the formulation of a national character reigned. However, images of nationality transgress these categories.

Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature, by Natasha Gill & Child of the Enlightenment. Revolutionary Europe reflected in a childhood diary, by Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker

neologische Prägung der zeitgenössischen theologischen Diskussionen. Diese hätten sich gegenüber Orthodoxie und Pietismus bei den Landgeistlichen durchgesetzt. Schließlich erkennt die Autorin darin eine „Wechselwirkung zwischen Tendenzen einer Säkularisierung und Rechristianisierung“ (p. 419). Sie plädiert für die größere Differenzierung bei der Darstellung des Säkularisierungsprozesses, der bis ins letzte Viertel des 19. Jahrhunderts in Gang bleibt. Wohl gibt der zweite Teil wichtige Anregungen, die zur verdichteten Betrachtung des ersten Teils beitragen. Stellenweise ist aber die Kohärenz nicht deutlich genug ausgearbeitet. Es entsteht damit beim Leser der Eindruck, mehrere, voneinander losgelöste, Untersuchungen vor sich zu haben, die dennoch irgendwie zusammenhängen. Zum Schluss bleibt die Frage danach, inwiefern Esther Berner ihre anfangs formulierten Ziele erfüllen konnte. Die Zürcher Landschulreform der 1770er Jahre wurde durchaus im Kontext lokaler Bedingungen und Motive dargestellt. Mehrheitlich wurden auch die überregionalen pädagogischen und sozialreformerischen Diskurse aufgegriffen und zusätzlich vertieft. Diese Vertiefungen, die Berner in Form diverser Kontextualisierungen vorgenommen hat, sind beeindruckend und zeugen von aufwändiger Recherchearbeit. Gerade in der Fülle der Informationen, die in Berners Buch über die 1770er Jahre aufzufinden sind, liegt aber auch ein Problem. Durch die zum Teil partikularistische Kontextualisierung verliert der Leser zuweilen die ohnehin sehr offen gehaltene Fragestellung aus den Augen. Der ausgesprochen dicht gehaltene Nominalstil, der manchmal über mehrere Teilsätze hinwegführt, kann besonders dann ermüdend wirken, wenn er auf thematische Wiederholungen trifft oder die Autorin zugleich reihenweise aus Quellen zitiert, respektive paraphrasiert. Wer sich von diesem Stil und der für eine bildungshistorische Arbeit eher störenden APA-Zitierweise nicht abschrecken lässt, findet in Esther Berners im Böhlau Verlag erschienenen Buch „Im Zeichen von Vernunft und Christentum“ ein äußerst reichhaltiges bildungshistorisches Kompendium über das vormoderne Zürcher Schulwesen, das sehr nahe am Quellentext geblieben ist.

A poetic journey: The transfer and transformation of German strategies for moral education in late eighteenth-century Dutch poetry for children

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of Little Poems for Children published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an expansion of educational space based on the integration of moral education in the spirit of the educational ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the Philanthropinists with poetical ideas and the nature of the child in both the content and the form of his poems. His poems were translated almost immediately into English, French and, surprisingly, as many of his poems were more or less adaptations of poems by Weisse and Burmann, into German too. Van Alphen’s trump card was a reversal of former strategies of education: instead of pressing moral ideas upon the children from an adult point of view, he aimed at identification by (1) writing from the perspective of children, (2) situating the poems in the world of experience of children, (3) using a childlike style with a frolicking metre, rhyme scheme and prosody, and (4) combining text and images, so putting the moral message across visually and textually at the same time. In this paper, we follow the journey of poems for children as media for the cultural transmission of moral educational ideas from Germany to the Netherlands from the perspective of cultural transmission, moral literacy and educational space. We conclude that Van Alphen, with the combined power of text and image, successfully adopted and adapted former educational strategies, such as the moral poetics developed by his German predecessors Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann. Taking their strategies on a poetic journey from Germany to the Netherlands, he not only transferred them, but transformed them as well. Van Alphen did so in a specific Dutch utilitarian way. His poems could be read for fun but were intended for learning. They were useful and entertaining at the same time, because he took the life and living environment of children into account, and particularly accounted for the concept of development as a distinguishing characteristic of the specific nature of the child with which child readers could identify.

Foxing the child : the cultural transmission of pedagogical norms and values in Dutch rewritings of literary classics for children 1850-1950

This article examines the reciprocity between children’s literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts: (1) cultural transmission as a strategy of educational ambition in its capacity to serve social initiation, (2) adaptation as a transformation strategy to adjust an artefact to a specific audience, and (3) gate keepership as the determining factor in the communication situation of literature for children. Comparing original masterpieces that were originally not, or not specifically, meant for children with their derivatives sheds light on the strategies that were used to mould narratives into pedagogical examples. It shows how protagonists were educated along the lines of the ever-changing pedagogical discourse brought about by historically variable concepts of childhood and displays the transition of the educational value of subjection to external mastery to the ideal of self-mastery of the child. Moreover, it shows how rewritings not only functioned as agents in the transmission of literary artefacts, but by means of that, also provided for the transmission of culture.