{"product_id":"serious-play-the-cultural-form-of-the-nineteenth-century-realist-novel-hardback-9780812234848","title":"Serious Play; The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Hardback) 9780812234848","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eSerious Play\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cfont size=\"5\"\u003eThe Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eJ. Jeffrey Franklin (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9780812234848\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eHardback, published 9 June 1999\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e256 pages\u003cbr\u003e22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.44 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSerious Play\u003c\/i\u003e provides a rich, multilayered argument that engages and contributes to contemporary theory and cultural studies.\" (\u003ci\u003eVictorian Studies\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eQueen Victoria was famously not amused, and the age to which she gave her name is not generally known for its playfulness or sense of fun. But play was pervasive in Victorian society and in the realist novels that were central to that culture. In \u003ci\u003eSerious Play\u003c\/i\u003e, J. Jeffrey Franklin examines the role of play in three areas-gambling, theatricality, and aesthetic theory-demonstrating in the process how the realist novel served as a vehicle for play while play in turn entered and helped define the form of realism.\u003cbr\u003e Franklin's analysis focuses on close readings of eight novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, as well as works by Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. The readings are grounded in histories and cultural studies of gambling, recreation, the stock market, theater and antitheatrical prejudice, the performance of gender roles, working-class protest, aesthetic theory, and especially the novel genre itself. While the treatments of gambling, theatricality, and aesthetics are specific, the book shows how play links each of them to broader, culturally defining issues that Victorian writings frequently express: values versus value, the artificial versus the authentic, and the real versus the illusory.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eSerious Play\u003c\/i\u003e demonstrates, as no previous study has, how play functioned as a linchpin concept within the discursive infrastructure of Victorian society, challenging critical commonplaces about the unplayfulness of the Victorians and the ideological conservatism of realism.\u003cbr\u003e \"\u003ci\u003eSerious Play\u003c\/i\u003e provides a completely new insight into the Victorian realist novel. . . . All the major theories of play are subjected to penetrating analysis through which their respective shortcomings and their historical conditioning are highlighted, so that the book can also be read as one of the most comprehensive assessments of modern play theories to date.\" -Wolfgang Iser\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1. Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Play and the Novel as a Cultural Form\u003cbr\u003e -Victorian Play\/Postmodern Play\u003cbr\u003e -The Realist Novel as Play Space\u003cbr\u003e 2. Gambling with Fortuna\u003cbr\u003e -Gaming\/Gambling\u003cbr\u003e -Choice, Circumstance, Chance\u003cbr\u003e -Extraliterary Antigambling Discourse\u003cbr\u003e -Finance, Panic, and Mode of Exchange\u003cbr\u003e -Good Moneyand the Matrimonial Gamble\u003cbr\u003e -Dead Hand, Live Hand, Invisible Hand\u003cbr\u003e -Bad Money and Class Mobility\u003cbr\u003e -Work\/Business\u003cbr\u003e -The Last Hand\u003cbr\u003e 3. Performing the Self\u003cbr\u003e -Just Act Natural\u003cbr\u003e -Victorian Antitheatrical Rhetoric and the Novelization of the Theatrical\u003cbr\u003e -The Novel Versus Melodrama\u003cbr\u003e -Theatricalization of the Social\/Socialization of the Theatrical\u003cbr\u003e -The Theatrical Subversion of Gender Roles\u003cbr\u003e -Antitheatrical Discourse\/Theatrical Form\u003cbr\u003e -Sympathy\/Theatricality\u003cbr\u003e -Reader Identification and Audience Form\u003cbr\u003e -Finale\u003cbr\u003e 4. Theorizing the Aesthetic Citizen\u003cbr\u003e -Aesthetic Play\u003cbr\u003e -Kantian Play\u003cbr\u003e -The Romantic Replacement of Play\u003cbr\u003e -The Labor of Art\/The Art of Labor\u003cbr\u003e -The Victorian Revival of Kant as Culture\u003cbr\u003e -Learning to Play by the Rules in Pendennis\u003cbr\u003e -Alton Locke's Colonization of Play\u003cbr\u003e -The Novelization of the Aesthetic\u003cbr\u003e -The Recuperation of Aesthetics and the Art of Subversion\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003cbr\u003e Works Cited\u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments\u003cbr\u003e Index\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52555706827032,"sku":"9780812234848","price":47.89,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/serious-play-the-cultural-form-of-the-nineteenth-century-realist-novel-hardback-9780812234848","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}