Palaces of Pleasure

Palaces of Pleasure PDF

Author: Lee Jackson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0300245092

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An energetic and exhilarating account of the Victorian entertainment industry, its extraordinary success and enduring impact The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century’s growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created ‘palaces of pleasure’. In this vivid, captivating book, Lee Jackson charts the rise of well-known institutions such as gin palaces, music halls, seaside resorts and football clubs, as well as the more peculiar attractions of the pleasure garden and international exposition, ranging from parachuting monkeys and human zoos to theme park thrill rides. He explores how vibrant mass entertainment came to dominate leisure time and how the attempts of religious groups and secular improvers to curb ‘immorality’ in the pub, variety theater and dance hall faltered in the face of commercial success. The Victorians’ unbounded love of leisure created a nationally significant and influential economic force: the modern entertainment industry.

Shopping for Pleasure

Shopping for Pleasure PDF

Author: Erika Rappaport

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1400843537

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In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.

Shared Pleasures

Shared Pleasures PDF

Author: Douglas Gomery

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780299132149

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Gomery (The coming of sound to the American cinema, 1975; The Hollywood studio system, 1986) draws upon his earlier work and that of other scholars to address the broader social functions of the film industry, showing how Hollywood adapted its business policies to diversity and change within American society. Includes 31 bandw photographs. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Pleasure Palaces

Pleasure Palaces PDF

Author: Vincent Katz

Publisher: powerHouse Books

Published: 2007-05-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781576873670

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Artist Hunt Slonem creates his magical paintings and sculptures of flora, fauna, saints, and other subjects with inspiration that he draws not only from his sense of spirituality, but also from his environment in a "self-created world" filled with myriad exotic forms, vivid colors, and mystical essences. While the public can imagine an artist at work or at home, rarely does an aficionado or a reader gain access to an artist's lair. That will change with the publication of Pleasure Palaces: The Art and Homes of Hunt Slonem, by Vincent Katz. Here, the reader is invited into not only the artist's studios (past and present) but also his homes in New York and Louisiana. From Slonem's first downtown studio in New York City "where it all began" in 1975 (shown on the book's cover) to his Victorian mansion on the Hudson River in Kingston, New York, as well as his two Louisiana plantations-one on the Bayou Teche in St. Mary Parish, about two hours' drive northwest of New Orleans, and the other in a remote location one hour north of Baton Rouge-the reader will get a unique perspective on how this Neo-Expressionist artist's environments are brought to life by his collections of antique neo-Gothic furniture, Blenko glass, and period frames, not to mention his astonishing collection of tropical birds, which are both his muses and his passion. Multi-talented poet/author/curator/documentarian/editor Vincent Katz, who has written about Slonem numerous times and has previously contributed poetry to Slonem's publications Hunt's Place and Exotica, has written an essay for Pleasure Palaces that not only provides a critical analysis of the artist's work, but also explores his spiritual life and how it influences his art and the extraordinary homes that are his havens. Katz's essay and an interview with the artist bookend lavishly illustrated color sections, with views of Slonem's estates (Albania Plantation, Lakeside Plantation, Cordt's Mansion) and New York City studios (including the private aviary in his West 10th Street studio) interspersed with his oil and watercolor paintings of flora and fauna. At the book's conclusion, an up-to-date chronology of Slonem's solo and group exhibitions (including forthcoming 2007 shows), a bibliography, a list of awards received, and a list of public collections that include his works complete this comprehensive document of Slonem's body of work.

Seeking Pleasure in the Old West

Seeking Pleasure in the Old West PDF

Author: David Dary

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780700608287

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"Pioneering Americans of the nineteenth century did not merely rush for gold, lust for land, and thrust aside the West's original inhabitants. These mountain men, cowboys, homesteaders, and cavalry troopers played nearly as hard as they worked, exploiting to the hilt what little leisure they could steal from their labors. Nor did they only carouse-drink, gamble, and womanize-as the West's fiction might suggest. They were spectators at bull and bear fights in California; actors in amateur theatricals in Army garrisons; and participants in communal barn raisings and quilting bees on the prairie. This is a delightful look at a very neglected aspect of the story of westering Americans."-Richard H. Dillon, author of Meriwether Lewis, Fool's Gold, and The Legend of Grizzly Adams. "The men on Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition square-danced to fiddle music. Cowboys' leisure pursuits included singing, storytelling, dominoes, reading, and foot races. U.S. Army soldiers played the newfangled game of baseball and even enjoyed debating and attending concerts. Dary's irresistible narrative recreates card games on Mississippi steamboats, New Orleans balls, frontier campfires and cafe-theatres, Santa Fe saloons, and Wyoming bicycle clubs and mineral spas, and it charts the emergence of a middle class that came to disapprove of prostitution, gambling, drinking, bear-baiting, and buffalo-hunting. An engaging chronicle."-Publishers Weekly. "As David Dary proves in this pleasurable book, the Old West was not all trouble and toil. Much is to be learned here-from mountain men and Indians to cowboys and homesteaders-about how to have fun, no matter the circumstances."-Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. "This lively and good-humored narrative takes the reader on a journey to a time before pleasure ruled lives, a time when fun was where you found it and was what you did when you had time."-Dallas Morning News. "This delightful volume describes activities ranging from the simple and the homespun to the bawdy and elaborate."-Booklist. "A treasury of the colorful characters who spent their brief hour on that wild and woolly stage."-Kansas City Star.

Palaces of Time

Palaces of Time PDF

Author: Elisheva Carlebach

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-04-04

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0674052544

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Palaces of Time resurrects the seemingly banal calendar as a means to understand early modern Jewish life. Elisheva Carlebach has unearthed a trove of beautifully illustrated calendars, to show how Jewish men and women both adapted to the Christian world and also forged their own meanings through time.

Game of Cages

Game of Cages PDF

Author: Harry Connolly

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2010-08-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0345508904

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A SECRET HIGH-STAKES AUCTION As a wealthy few gather to bid on a predator capable of destroying all life on earth, the sorcerers of the Twenty Palace Society mobilize to stop them. Caught up in the scramble is Ray Lilly, the lowest of the low in the society—an ex–car thief and the expendable assistant of a powerful sorcerer. Ray possesses exactly one spell to his name, along with a strong left hook. But when he arrives in the small town in the North Cascades where the bidding is to take place, the predator has escaped and the society’s most powerful enemies are desperate to recapture it. All Ray has to do is survive until help arrives. But it may already be too late.

The New Palaces of Medieval Venice

The New Palaces of Medieval Venice PDF

Author:

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published:

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780271048369

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The medieval palaces of Venice are unlike those from anywhere else and they also survive in this equally unique city in far greater numbers. This well-presented study argues, however, that contrary to other opinions, the architecture of Venice was developed from that of northern and western Europe and not from that of Byzantium and Late Antiquity.

The Palace Papers

The Palace Papers PDF

Author: Tina Brown

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0593138104

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “addictively readable” (The Washington Post) inside story of the British royal family’s battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, twenty-first-century crises “Frothy and forthright, a kind of Keeping Up with the Windsors with sprinkles of Keats.”—The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Elle, Town & Country “Never again” became Queen Elizabeth II’s mantra shortly after Princess Diana’s tragic death. More specif­ically, there could never be “another Diana”—a mem­ber of the family whose global popularity upstaged, outshone, and posed an existential threat to the Brit­ish monarchy. Picking up where Tina Brown’s masterful The Diana Chronicles left off, The Palace Papers reveals how the royal family reinvented itself after the trau­matic years when Diana’s blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet. Brown takes readers on a tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays, and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last twenty-five years. We see the Queen’s stoic re­solve after the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and Prince Philip, her partner for seven decades, and how she triumphs in her Jubilee years even as family troubles rage around her. Brown explores Prince Charles’s determination to make Camilla Parker Bowles his wife, the tension between William and Harry on “different paths,” the ascend­ance of Kate Middleton, the downfall of Prince An­drew, and Harry and Meghan’s stunning decision to step back as senior royals. Despite the fragile monar­chy’s best efforts, “never again” seems fast approaching. Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevoca­bly change how the world perceives and under­stands the royal family.

Palace of Spies

Palace of Spies PDF

Author: Sarah Zettel

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0544074114

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Peggy Fitzroy is clever enough to fake her way into King George's court in London, but is she clever enough to survive in his Palace of Spies?