Abstract
When I was honoured by the invitation to share in this tribute to a great and noble historian of culture I had no doubt in my mind as to the aspect of his rich and varied oeuvre I most wanted to examine and discuss. Like all of us who are interested in cultural history I have had frequent occasion to remember that inspired coinage of Huizinga’s who matched the idea of homo faber with that of homo ludens. Long ago I wrote a little essay entitled Meditations on a Hobby Horse or The Roots of Artistic Form which developed into a book entitled Art and Illusion largely concerned with that most elusive of mental states, that of fiction. Later, when I studied the idea of personification of such entities as Fama or Fortuna1 I remembered the pregnant pages Huizinga devoted to this strange twilight of ideas between mythology and abstraction in his study of Alanus de Insulis and again in Homo ludens. Now I am once more in the orbit of his problems in a study on which I am engaged that is to deal with decoration, ornament and the grotesque.
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To the memory of Rosalie L. Colie (1925–1972)
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Literatur
P. Geyl, ‘Huizinga as an Accuser of his Age’, History and Theory, II (1963) iii, 231–262, 255. (No source is given).
N. Tinbergen, ‘On War and Peace in Animals and Man’, Science, CLX (28th June, 1968) 1411–1418.
Thanks to the kindness of the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement I have been allowed to see their collection of references from which it appears that the German term Hackliste was used by T. J. Schjelderup-Ebbe in Zeitschrift für Psychologie, LXXXVIII (1922) 227. The earliest non-scientific usage there recorded is in A. Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928) 48. Could the novelist have taken it over from his brother, the biologist? W. C. Allee, Animal Aggregations (Chicago, 1931) and The Social Life of Animals (London-Toronto, 1938) appears to have made the term more popular, though its real vogue dates from the post-war period.
J. S. Bruner, ‘Nature and Uses of Immaturity’, American Psychologist, XXVII (8. August 1972) 1–22, which also offers an excellent point of entry into the bibliography of the problem of play. See also Maria W. Piers, ed., Play and Development (New York, 1972).
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Gombrich, E.H. (1973). Huizinga’s Homo ludens . In: Koops, W.R.H., Kossmann, E.H., van der Plaat, G. (eds) Johan Huizinga 1872–1972. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0730-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0730-1_8
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