Laboring to play
Subtitle: home entertainment and the spectacle of middle-class cultural life, 1850-1920
By: Melanie Dawson.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa
Language: eng
Number of pages: 257
Subjects: Leisure -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Middle class -- Recreation -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century.
Description: "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-247) and index.
Table of contents: title: Labor, leisure, and the scope of ungenteel play; title: Dramatic regression : the borrowed pleasures and privileges of youth; title: The social body and the severed head : the cultural work of grotesque play; title: Skills rewarded : women's lives transformed through entertainment; title: Staging disaster : turn-of-the-century entertainment scenes and the failure of personal transformation; title: Old games, new narratives, and the specter of a generational divide; title: Imagined unity : entertainment's communal spectacles and shared histories.