Laboring to Play

Autorentext

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

Klappentext

The changing styles of middle-class home entertainments, Melanie Dawson argues, point to evolving ideas of class identity in US 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 encouraged participants to test out the boundaries that were beginning to define middle-class lifestyles.

Zusammenfassung
A compelling analysis of how "middling" Americans entertained themselves and how these entertainments changed over time.