Laboring to Play [electronic resource] : Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920 / Melanie Dawson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dawson, Melanie, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Middle class--Recreation--United States--History--19th century.

Middle class.

Leisure--United States--History--19th century.

Leisure.

United States--Social life and customs--19th century.

United States.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (270 p.)

Place of Publication:

Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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

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.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-247) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8173-8733-1

OCLC:

860712637