Fables Without Labels: The Jewish Folkloric between Adult and Child Readerships

• In Event: Seductive Modernity?: Intimacy and Culture in the 19th Century

Abstract

One of the most significant developments in Western modernity was the so-called “invention of childhood,” wherein juvenility came to be understood as a distinctive phase of life requiring different educational and cultural materials than adulthood. The period under discussion represents the illuminating moment *just before* the widespread production of age-stratified cultural artifacts. Before children’s texts emerged, children—together with their adult caregivers—read and heard folk literature. The category of the folkloric took on a particular gendered dimension in Jewish Europe, such that women and children tended to share reading materials with each other and with “men who were like women” in the parlance of the time. These readers were understood to lack sophistication, education, and even full cultural agency. When authors began to address children at all, they did so with heavy didacticism. This presentation will draw on primary sources from the nebulous period before clear boundaries arose between adult and children’s publishing to some of these folkloric tales and their messages to readers of varying ages.

Author

• Miriam Udel, Emory University