Dice, cards, wheels : a different history of French culture / Thomas M. Kavanagh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kavanagh, Thomas M.

Series:

Critical authors & issues.

Critical authors and issues

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gambling--France--History.

Gambling.

Gambling in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, PA : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions. Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler. Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Toward a Cultural History of Gambling

2. Dicing with the Saints: Jehan Bodel's Jeu de saint Nicolas

3. Getting God's Edge: Pascal's Gambler as Paraclete

4. The Libertine's Bluff

5. Gambling High and Low: Casanova's Story of My Life

6. Staging the Gambler: Sex, Sentiment, and Family Values

7. Gambling on the Anvil of History: Balzac's The Wild Ass)s Skin

8. Whist, or the Aristocracy of Mystery: Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Beneath the Cards in a Game of Whist"

9. Betting Against Your Self: Paul Bourget's ''A Gambler"

10. Dreaming the Casino: Demy's Baie des anges and Melville's Bob le fiambeur

Conclusion

Appendix ''A Gambler" / Bourget, Paul

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780812202458

0812202457

OCLC:

654304799