Laboring To Play: Home Entertainment And The Spectacle Of Middle-class Cultural Life, 1850-1920 - Couverture rigide

Dawson, Melanie

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0817314490 ISBN 13 : 9780817314491

Editeur : The University of Alabama Press, 2008

Synopsis

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 middling 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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: The University of Alabama Press
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0817314490
• ISBN 13: 9780817314491
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 272
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible