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Bezig met laden... A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhymes for Children (1686)door John Bunyan
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Combines the moral and religious verse for children of three seventeenth and eighteenth-century English writers. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)821.4Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1625-1702, Caroline and Restoration periodsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhimes for Children was an assigned text in the course I took on early children's literature, during the course of my masters, and was paired in the syllabus with Isaac Watts' Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), which is also a collection of poetry for children. On the whole, I did not enjoy the Bunyan quite as much as the Watts. The poetry itself is far less accomplished, and the author's evident contempt for the form, as expressed in his preface, is perhaps explained by his lack of skill with it. The text here consists mostly of awkwardly rhyming four-line stanzas - "My Filth grew strong, and boyled, / And me throughout defiled, / Its pleasures me beguiled, / My soul, how are thou spoyled" - and frequently has a nasty tone to it that is off-putting. A concern with sin and likely damnation is a theme one would expect from a Puritan, but not all such authors manage to convey such loathing, both of the sin and the sinner. Compare Bunyan's tone here to James Janeway, in his 1671 A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children. I think part of the problem is that Bunyan doesn't seem to sympathize with his audience. He realizes that educating the young is important - in this he is like many other Puritans, who were, as a group, the first in the Anglophone world to truly grasp the potential of a literature aimed at children - but he doesn't seem to like them, based on his prefatory remarks about the work being aimed at fools and children, and the necessity of using a "foolish" style to communicate with them.
I have wanted to read The Pilgrim's Progress ever since I was a little girl, and fell in love with Alcott's classic Little Women, which has copious references to it, and I still want to read it, despite my lukewarm response to this collection. I'm glad to have read this one, as it did offer me an additional 17th-century children's text to compare with the Janeway, but I'm not sure I'd strongly recommend it to other readers, unless they are interested in early Anglophone children's literature and/or the work of Bunyan and the Puritans at large. ( )