Laboring To Play

by Dawson, Melanie

• ISBN13: 9780817314491
• ISBN10: 0817314490
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-27
• Publisher: Univ of Alabama Pr

Summary

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 out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles. From 19th-century parlor games involving grotesque physical contortions to early-20th-century recitations of an idealized past, leisure employments mediated between domestic and public spheres, individuals and class-based affiliations, and ideals of egalitarian social life and visible hierarchies based on privilege. Negotiating these paradigms, home entertainments provided their participants with unique ways of performing displays of individual ambitions within a world of polite social interaction. Laboring to Play deals with subjects as wide ranging as social performances, social history (etiquette and gentility), literary history, representations of childhood, and the history of the book.

Author Biography

Melanie Dawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary and coeditor of The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader.

 

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(19)
Labor, Leisure, and the Scope of Ungenteel Play	20	(26)
Dramatic Regression: The Borrowed Pleasures and Privileges of Youth	46	(25)
Fracturing Genteel Identity: The Cultural Work of Grotesque Play	71	(30)
Skills Rewarded: Women's Lives Transformed through Entertainment	101	(29)
Staging Disaster: Turn-of-the-Century Entertainment Scenes and the Failure of Personal Transformation	130	(29)
Old Games, New Narratives, and the Specter of a Generational Divide	159	(25)
Imagined Unity: Entertainment's Communal Spectacles and Shared Histories	184	(24)
Epilogue	208	(5)
Notes	213	(28)
Selected Bibliography	241	(8)
Index	249