Introduction

The introduction traces the wider historical and theoretical narratives in which iconoclasm and child’s play have played prominent--but typically opposed--roles. It begins with Baudelaire’s association of parents who deny toys to their children with Protestantism, and shows that this is symptomatic of a widely postulated opposition between play and the Reformation, linked to the identification of violently iconoclastic disenchantment as the essence of modernity. It then explores the roles that iconoclasm and play assumed in the emergence of modern aesthetics from Schiller to Gadamer, and the prominence of toys in modern accounts of materiality. These discussions set up the larger narratives of iconoclasm and play against which the texture of iconoclastic child’s play itself is tested in the chapters that follow.