Title: The leisure ethic
First published: 1999
Description: At the Turn of the Last Century, as routinized industrial labor made a mockery of the gospel of work, Americans increasingly sought fulfillment not on the job but in their leisure activities. This book explores the multiple and, at times, contradictory tensions surrounding this turn to play and examines their impact on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature.

Arguing that American writers participated in the ongoing debates over labor and leisure more strenuously than is commonly understood, the author shows how literary narratives both responded to and helped shape the emerging gospel of play.

Broad in scope and method, and structured by a series of original and illuminating pairings of texts and authorsincluding Thoreau and Mark Twain, Abraham Cahan and Ole Rolvaag, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edna Ferber, James Weldon Johnson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright, and William Faulkner and Hurston - this book offers an important new direction for the study of labor, leisure, and representation.
Subjects: History, History and criticism, American literature, Leisure, Recreation in literature, Literature and society, Work in literature, Play in literature, Leisure in literature, Sociology, Histoire et critique, Littérature et société, Arbeid, Loisir dans la littérature, Amerikaans, Literature, Jeu dans la littérature, Spiel, Play and Playthings, In literature, Loisirs dans la littérature, Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer, Work, Loisir, Literatur, English, Recreatie, Travail dans la littérature, Letterkunde, Littérature américaine, Histoire, Spel, Leisure Activities, Freizeit, Arbeit, American literature, history and criticism, 19th century, American literature, history and criticism, 20th century, Labor in literature, LITERARY CRITICISM, American, General
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century
LC classification: PS217.L44 G58 1999