Laboring to Play

Laboring to Play PDF Author: Melanie Dawson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817357645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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 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.

Laboring to Play

Laboring to Play PDF Author: Melanie Dawson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817357645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 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.

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel PDF Author: John J. Su
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, the postmodern and the postcolonial. As both an insightful critique into the themes that drive a range of today's best novelists and a bold restatement of what the imagination is and what it means for contemporary culture, this book breaks new ground in the study of twenty-first-century literature.

Pre and Post-publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English

Pre and Post-publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English PDF Author: François Gallix
Publisher: Editions Publibook
ISBN: 2748335104
Category : Adaptations
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description


The Literary World

The Literary World PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description


Readings of the Particular

Readings of the Particular PDF Author: Anne Holden Rønning
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042021632
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The present collection aims at throwing light on transculturality and the identities and masks that people put on, in writing as much as in life, in an age of global levelling and the struggle for a particular place in a postcolonial world. Topics covered include: North African identity in France; cultural citizenship and the Asian diaspora; novels of beur self-identity by Maghrebi immigrants in France; Scottish fiction, Britain and Empire; memory, amnesia, and the re-invention of the past in South Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere; borders, necrophilia and history in Southern African fiction; encodings of female control; spectating in black documentary cinema; theatre, performance, and the Western presence in Africa; masks, history, transtextuality, and other aspects of Irish poetry and drama; the masking and unmasking of identity in the African-American novel; violence and Titus Andronicus in black Nova Scotian poetry; notions of the national and of indigeneity in contemporary Canadian drama; Native Canadians, space, and the city. Authors and artists treated include: William Boyd; André Brink; George Elliott Clarke; David Dabydeen; Ralph Ellison; Bessie Head; Seamus Heaney; Tomson Highway; Isaac Julien; Daniel David Moses; Paul Muldoon; Albert Murray; Jean Rhys; Sir Walter Scott; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Wright; and W.B. Yeats.

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism PDF Author: Steven G. Kellman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000441512
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Though it might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, translingual writing - texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one - has an ancient pedigree. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism aims to provide a comprehensive overview of translingual literature in a wide variety of languages throughout the world, from ancient to modern times. The volume includes sections on: translingual genres - with chapters on memoir, poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema ancient, medieval, and modern translingualism global perspectives - chapters overseeing European, African, and Asian languages Combining chapters from lead specialists in the field, this volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the vibrant area of translingual literature. Attracting scholars from a variety of disciplines, this interdisciplinary and pioneering Handbook will advance current scholarship of the permutations of languages among authors throughout time.

A Comparative Analysis of the South African and German Reception of Nadine Gordimer's, Andre Brink's and J.M. Coetzee's Works

A Comparative Analysis of the South African and German Reception of Nadine Gordimer's, Andre Brink's and J.M. Coetzee's Works PDF Author: Eva-Marie Herlitzius
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 9783825883492
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


Diaspora and Memory

Diaspora and Memory PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401203806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement impinge upon the lives of an ever increasing number of people worldwide, with business class comfort but more often with unrelenting violence. Since the early 1990s, the political and cultural realities of global migration have led to a growing interest in the different forms of “diasporic” existence and identities. The articles in this book do not focus on the external boundaries of diaspora – what is diasporic and what is not? – but on one of its most important internal boundaries, which is indicated by the second term in the title of this book: memory. It is not by chance that the right to remember, the responsibility to recall, are central issues of the debates in diasporic communities and their relation to their cultural and political surroundings. The relation of diaspora and memory contains important critical and maybe even subversive potentials. Memory can transcend the territorial logic of dispersal and return, and emerge as a competing source of diasporic identity. The articles in this volume explore how, shaped by the responsibilities of testimony as well as by the normalizing forces of amnesia and forgetting and political interests, memory is a performative, figurative process rather than a secure space of identity.

Voices of Justice and Reason

Voices of Justice and Reason PDF Author: Geoffrey V. Davis
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Over the past fifty years transformations of great moment have taken place in South Africa. Apartheid and the subsequent transition to a democratic, non-racial society in particular have exercised a profound effect on the practice of literature. This study traces the development of literature under apartheid, then seeks to identify the ways in which writers and theatre practitioners are now facing the challenges of a new social order. The main focus is on the work of black writers, prime among them Matsemela Manaka, Mtutuzeli Matshoba and Richard Rive, who, as politically committed members of the oppressed majority, bore witness to the "black experience" through their writing. Despite the draconian censorship system they were able to address the social problems caused by racial discrimination in all areas of life, particularly through forced removals, the migrant labour system, and the creation of the homelands. Their writing may be read both as a comprehensive record of everyday life under apartheid and as an alternative cultural history of South Africa. Particular attention is paid to theatre as a barometer of social change in South Africa. The concluding chapters consider how in the current period of transition writers and arts institutions have set about reassessing their priorities, redefining their function and seeking new aesthetic directions in taking up the challenge of imagining a new society.

Human Rights and Nadine Gordimer's Fiction

Human Rights and Nadine Gordimer's Fiction PDF Author: Mateti Prabhakar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527532887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The book explores the complex problem of apartheid, racial segregation in South African society and the struggle against the “colour bar” represented in the fictional world of Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel Laureate of the South African Letters. It shows how Gordimer, a crusader for the human rights of black people, has launched a lifetime battle against the apartheid regime’s unjust and heartless censorship of creative writing and freedom of speech in South Africa by virtue of fictionalizing her human rights activism, thereby teaching humanity. It demonstrates how black people are denied their basic human rights from the cradle to the grave by the white chauvinistic apartheid regime. This volume is a space for scholars, writers and activists to debate issues related to race, class and human rights.