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

Dawson, Melanie

 
9780817357641: Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0817357645 ISBN 13 : 9780817357641
Editeur : University Alabama Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

À propos de l?auteur

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

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
University Alabama Press
Date d'édition
2013
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0817357645
ISBN 13 
9780817357641
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
269
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780817314491: Laboring To Play: Home Entertainment And The Spectacle Of Middle-class Cultural Life, 1850-1920

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0817314490 ISBN 13 :  9780817314491
Editeur : The University of Alabama Press, 2008
Couverture rigide