Queen 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 Serious Play,
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.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.Serious Play 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."Serious Play 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
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