The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept by Matthew Kaiser

By Matthew Kaiser

Nineteenth-century Britain was once an international in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and equipped hundreds of thousands of parks and playgrounds. within the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a competition for survival. The playful baby grew to become an emblem of the long run.
A global in play ability issues: an international in flux and a global trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The ebook explores the level to which play (competition, rest, mischief, success, joyful celebration, mind's eye) pervades nineteenth-century literature and tradition and types the rules of the fashionable self. Play made the Victorian global cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. this can be the anomaly of modernity. Kaiser supplies an account of ways convinced Victorian misfits—working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Brontë, unfastened spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde—struggled to make experience of this new international. In so doing, they found the artwork of contemporary life.

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