| This dissertation explores the Victorian discourse of play and playfulness, showing that play not only reflects Victorian beliefs, values, attitudes, and responses, but helped shape and direct them. Situating its analysis within various strains of literary and cultural criticism, the study traces responses to the then-burgeoning arena of sport and games though both literary and historical texts (novels, children's literature, periodicals, sports newspapers, and games and conduct manuals). It shows that neither novel nor manual lived in a world devoid of the other, and that what surfaces in a novel is frequently taken from the discourse of games or shapes a later discussion of a game in a manual. The study examines ways in which play intersected with nearly every aspect of Victorian life, but focuses in particular on the ways in which sports and games affected the home and domestic life, and helped to shape Victorian and later Edwardian familial, domestic, and imperial identities. It argues against ideas put forth by those like James Kincaid, who suggests that controls and order do not exist in play. Issues of order and control, consequence and connection, this study suggests, do arise persistently at sites of play, as do issues of race, class, gender, and age. Ultimately, this study considers ways in which sports and games are used to explore the possibility of social or individual freedom, are used as social equalizers between races, classes, genders, and ages, but are at the same time considered with much anxiety, are the sites of cultural tension and discomfort about those very freedoms and equalities. This is evident in nineteenth and early twentieth century children's texts and texts about childhood through the incompatibility of domesticity and play, and it is evident in adult texts of the same period by those texts' continual striving to correct balances, whether those balances be between playfulness and seriousness, or between identity markers such as race, class, and gender. |
