Research and Why: Before this class I had never read or heard of “A Dialogue Between Christ, Youth, and the Devil.” I thought the title in itself sounded very interesting and figured it would be a good way to learn more about it by picking it as one of my blog entries. It certainly opened my eyes to how intense the New England Primer 1777 edition was, and in several ways I was amazed as to what was portrayed to young children as being sinful, wrong, or evil. The Devil’s response to the child talking about finding pleasure in playing and singing, is happiness. The Devil is glad because those things were portrayed as negative activities during this time. Some places in the writing made me laugh, while others were extremely frustrating. After our discussions in class I found using historical, political, psychological, and textual analysis was extremely helpful and interesting.

What I found: Unfortunately I could not find a lot of information on this piece, all of it’s connections were tied to the New England Primer (I included a picture of the book below if you are interested in what it looked like) where it was initially published. (http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/nep/1777/index.htm) This is a link to the website I looked at of the edition in which “A Dialogue Between Christ, Youth, and the Devil” was published initially. I think the additional material in the book gives a lot of information about the text we are looking at. This includes "An Alphabet of Lessons for Youth.", "Spiritual Milk for American BABES.", and "Some proper Names of MEN and WOMEN, to teach Children to spell their own."
My interpretation: “A Dialogue Between Christ, Youth, and the Devil” in my opinion was a result of the Puritan culture during the time frame it was written in. Education and religion went hand in hand as the alphabet, spelling, and English in general were taught to the youth. The fear entwined in the majority of this book was an attempt to create “good” and “moral” children. The two ways I thought were most helpful to analyze in this instance were psychologically and historically. There were obvious psychological messages that this text was trying to give the children who were being raised with this as one of their main educational texts. With lines from the Devil to the Youth like, "If thou wilt but be ruled by me, an artist thou shalt quickly be..." there pictures of the author's preconceived ideas about artist's and what type of person they were thought to be. The connections between playing, singing, art, and nature and death leading to eternal damnation were everywhere. How scary for a child! How scary for an adult! I found the ending to be the most interesting as Death joined the dialogue stating, "Youth, I am come to take thy breath, and carry thee to shades of death: No pity to thee I can show, thou hast thy God offended so." This clearly shows the cultural history of this time-frame. God was not a loving being, but a condemning being and one who should be feared.

How this relates to what we've been discussing in class: Over the past three weeks we have discussed the four main ways it is beneficial to analyze children's literature. These being textual, historical, political, and psychological. Although I could find ways in which each of these could be used as tools to discover more about "A Dialogue Between Christ, Youth, and the Devil" I found historical and psychological to be particularly helpful. Just as the authors for "Little Red Riding Hood" wrote their versions of the story differently depending on the time which it was written and the cultural ideas and morals held in that time, the text I focused on was written similarly. This applies and can be used to further our class discussions, it is actually a very strong piece because a lot of the psychological aspects are so strong. There is no beating around the bush with this piece of literature and the points it is trying to make.