This interdisciplinary anthology explores the representation of everyday life across several disciplines in a century known for its interest in individual experience of the mundane as well as the heroic. Comprised of essays by established and emerging scholars of literature, art, and music history, the volume explores not merely the range of performances under the banner of the everyday, but also the meanings inherent in these attempts to create art out of the experience of the real. In this collection, the authors attempt to provide a wide-ranging picture of the many ways in which the notion of the everyday is a valuable conceptual frame through which the eighteenth century may be apprehended, as this critical term allows for issues of gender, race, and class to come into focus. Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University.

Focusing on James's last three completed novels - The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl - Maya Higashi Wakana shows how a microsociological approach to James's novels radically revises the widespread tradition of putting James's characters into historical and cultural contexts. Wakana begins with the premise that day-to-day living is inherently theatrical and thus duplicitous, and goes on to show that James's art relies significantly on his powerful sense of the agonizing and even dangerous complications of mundane face-to-face rituals that pervade his work. Centrally informed by social thinkers such as G. H. Mead and Erving Goffman, Wakana's study discloses the richness, complexity, and singularity of the interpersonal connections depicted in James's late novels. Persuasively argued, and rich in original close readings, her book makes an important contribution to James's studies and to theories of social interaction.

This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the género chico criollo in the context of Argentina’s modernization. Victoria Lynn Garrett examines how selected plays mediated the impact of economic liberalism, technological changes, new competing and contradictory gender roles, intense labor union activity, and the foreign/nativist dichotomy. Popular theaters served as spaces for cultural agency by portraying conventional and innovative performances of daily life. This dramatic corpus was a critical mass cultural medium that allowed audiences to evaluate the dominant fictions of liberal modernity, to critique Argentina’s purportedly democratic culture, and to imagine alternative performances of everyday life in accordance with their realities. Through a fresh look at the relationship among politics, economics, popular culture, and performance in Argentina’s modernization period, the book uncovers largely overlooked articulations of popular-class identities and desires for greater inclusion that would drive social and political struggles to this day.

Performing Motherhood explores relationships between performativity and the maternal. Highlighting mothers’ lived experiences, this collection examines mothers’ creativity and agency as they perform in everyday life: in mothering, in activism, and in the arts. Chapters contain theoretically grounded works that emerge from multiple disciplines and cross-disciplines and include first-person narratives, empirical studies, artistic representations, and performance pieces. This book focuses on motherwork, maternal agency, mothers’ multiple identities and marginalized maternal voices, and explores how these are performatively constituted, negotiated and affirmed.

Considering issues such as pain and fertility, and exploring both the language of medical discourse and the silence of personal mystery, she reveals the numerous ways in which giving birth is narrated in the contemporary U.S. Pollock draws on cultural criticism, performance studies, and narrative theory to unpack this long-ignored genre.

Performing Motherhood explores relationships between performativity and the maternal. Highlighting mothers' lived experiences, this collection examines mothers' creativity and agency as they perform in everyday life: in mothering, in activism, and in the arts. Chapters contain theoretically grounded works that emerge from multiple disciplines and cross-disciplines and include first-person narratives, empirical studies, artistic representations, and performance pieces. This book focuses on motherwork, maternal agency, mothers' multiple identities and marginalized maternal voices, and explores how these are performatively constituted, negotiated and affirmed.

Performing Governance sets out a new framework to assess the performance of partnerships and examines what these actually deliver. This is applied to three areas of New Labour's welfare policy; child safeguarding, urban regeneration and the modernisation of health and social care. This book contributes to understanding governance under New Labour.