1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910453730503321

Autore

Dawson Melanie <1967->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Tuscaloosa, : University of Alabama Press, c2005

ISBN

0-8173-8733-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (270 p.)

Disciplina

790.1

790.1/0973/09034

790.10973

790.1097309034

Soggetti

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

Leisure - United States - History - 19th century

Electronic books.

United States Social life and customs 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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