Laboring to play

by Melanie Dawson

"Drawing from 19th- and early-20th-century fiction, guidebooks on leisure, periodicals and newspaper columns, and a polemical examination of class structures, this book 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."--BOOK JACKET.