A01=Melanie Dawson
Author_Melanie Dawson
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSA
Category=NHTB
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9780817357641
- Weight: 456g
- Dimensions: 149 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 05 Sep 2013
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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 parlour 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 parlour games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealised 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.
From 19th-century parlour games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealised 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.
Melanie Dawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, USA and coeditor of The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader.
