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While we owe much to twentieth and twenty-first century researchers’ careful studies of children’s linguistic and dramatic play, authors of literature, especially children’s literature, have matched and even anticipated these researchers in revealing play’s power—authors well aware of the way children use play to experiment with their position in the world. This volume explores the work of authors of literature as well as film, both those who write for children and those who use children as their central characters, who explore the empowering and subversive potentials of children at play. Play gives children imaginative agency over limited lives and allows for experimentation with established social roles; play’s disruptive potential also may prove dangerous not only for children but for the society that restricts them.
A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of “junior republics” and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of “sheltered” childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Li...