Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920 - Hardcover

Dawson, Melanie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817314490 ISBN 13: 9780817314491

Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A compelling analysis of how "middling" Americans entertained themselves and how these entertainments changed over time.

The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in U.S. culture. Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, Laboring to Play interrogates the ways that leisure performances (such as parlor games, charades, home dramas, and tableaux vivants) encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles.

From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of performing displays of individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction.

Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melanie Dawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary and coeditor of The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

A compelling analysis of how "middling" Americans entertained themselves and how these entertainments changed over time.

"The purposes of Laboring to Play are several: to give new and sustained attention to the parlor as an important site of social and cultural formation; to consider the ways in which home entertainment texts and practices helped shape an emerging middle-class identity in the United States; to chart the evolution of such texts and practices and thus also their changing effects on class formation; to extend existing scholarship on the middle class; to reexamine the inter-relationship of work and play in American culture; and to explore the roles of pleasure and game-playing in American identity. Highly effective are the detailed readings of the 'entertainment chronotope' in a number of important American literary texts, including Alcott's Little Women, Wharton's The House of Mirth, Lewis's Main Street, Gilman's Herland, and Cather's My Ántonia."--William Gleason, author of The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840-1940.

"A learned and engaging analysis based on an impressive body of research. . . . Dawson's focus on entertainment in the home has the benefit of providing us with a close and careful look at the intersections between ideologies of domesticity, class, and leisure."--Cynthia J. Davis, author of Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine in American Literature, 1845-1915

Aus dem Klappentext

The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in U.S. culture. Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, periodicals and newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, Laboring to Play interrogates the ways that leisure performances (such as parlor games, charades, home dramas, and tableaux vivants) encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles.

From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of displaying individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction.

Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.

Melanie Dawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary and coeditor of The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ALABAMA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817314490
• ISBN 13: 9780817314491
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar