Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Serious Play provides a rich, multilayered argument that engages and contributes to contemporary theory and cultural studies." *
Victorian Studies *
Table of Contents1. Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Play and the Novel as a Cultural Form
—Victorian Play/Postmodern Play
—The Realist Novel as Play Space
2. Gambling with Fortuna
—Gaming/Gambling
—Choice, Circumstance, Chance
—Extraliterary Antigambling Discourse
—Finance, Panic, and Mode of Exchange
—Good Moneyand the Matrimonial Gamble
—Dead Hand, Live Hand, Invisible Hand
—Bad Money and Class Mobility
—Work/Business
—The Last Hand
3. Performing the Self
—Just Act Natural
—Victorian Antitheatrical Rhetoric and the Novelization of the Theatrical
—The Novel Versus Melodrama
—Theatricalization of the Social/Socialization of the Theatrical
—The Theatrical Subversion of Gender Roles
—Antitheatrical Discourse/Theatrical Form
—Sympathy/Theatricality
—Reader Identification and Audience Form
—Finale
4. Theorizing the Aesthetic Citizen
—Aesthetic Play
—Kantian Play
—The Romantic Replacement of Play
—The Labor of Art/The Art of Labor
—The Victorian Revival of Kant as Culture
—Learning to Play by the Rules in Pendennis
—Alton Locke's Colonization of Play
—The Novelization of the Aesthetic
—The Recuperation of Aesthetics and the Art of Subversion
Notes
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Index
