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Laboring to play : home entertainment and the spectacle of middle-class cultural life, 1850-1920 / Melanie Dawson.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, [2005]Copyright date: ©2005ISBN:
  • 0817314490
  • 9780817314491
Subject(s): Genre/Form: DDC classification:
  • 790.1/0973/09034 22
LOC classification:
  • GV53 .D39 2005eb
Contents:
Labor, leisure, and the scope of ungenteel play -- Dramatic regression : the borrowed pleasures and privileges of youth -- The social body and the severed head : the cultural work of grotesque play -- Skills rewarded : women's lives transformed through entertainment -- Staging disaster : turn-of-the-century entertainment scenes and the failure of personal transformation -- Old games, new narratives, and the specter of a generational divide -- Imagined unity : entertainment's communal spectacles and shared histories.
Summary: "Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, periodicals and newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, this book 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."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-247) and index.

Labor, leisure, and the scope of ungenteel play -- Dramatic regression : the borrowed pleasures and privileges of youth -- The social body and the severed head : the cultural work of grotesque play -- Skills rewarded : women's lives transformed through entertainment -- Staging disaster : turn-of-the-century entertainment scenes and the failure of personal transformation -- Old games, new narratives, and the specter of a generational divide -- Imagined unity : entertainment's communal spectacles and shared histories.

"Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, periodicals and newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, this book 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."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

English.

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