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Dice, Cards, Wheels : A Different History of French Culture / Thomas M. Kavanagh.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextSeries: Critical Authors and IssuesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2013]Copyright date: ©2005Description: 1 online resource (264 p.) : 2 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812238600
  • 9780812202458
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 795.0944
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Toward a Cultural History of Gambling -- 2. Dicing with the Saints: Jehan Bodel's Jeu de saint Nicolas -- 3. Getting God's Edge: Pascal's Gambler as Paraclete -- 4. The Libertine's Bluff -- 5. Gambling High and Low: Casanova's Story of My Life -- 6. Staging the Gambler: Sex, Sentiment, and Family Values -- 7. Gambling on the Anvil of History: Balzac's The Wild Ass)s Skin -- 8. Whist, or the Aristocracy of Mystery: Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Beneath the Cards in a Game of Whist" -- 9. Betting Against Your Self: Paul Bourget's ''A Gambler" -- 10. Dreaming the Casino: Demy's Baie des anges and Melville's Bob le fiambeur -- Conclusion -- Appendix ''A Gambler" -- Notes -- Index
Summary: Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions.Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler.Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812202458

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Toward a Cultural History of Gambling -- 2. Dicing with the Saints: Jehan Bodel's Jeu de saint Nicolas -- 3. Getting God's Edge: Pascal's Gambler as Paraclete -- 4. The Libertine's Bluff -- 5. Gambling High and Low: Casanova's Story of My Life -- 6. Staging the Gambler: Sex, Sentiment, and Family Values -- 7. Gambling on the Anvil of History: Balzac's The Wild Ass)s Skin -- 8. Whist, or the Aristocracy of Mystery: Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Beneath the Cards in a Game of Whist" -- 9. Betting Against Your Self: Paul Bourget's ''A Gambler" -- 10. Dreaming the Casino: Demy's Baie des anges and Melville's Bob le fiambeur -- Conclusion -- Appendix ''A Gambler" -- Notes -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Gambling has been a practice central to many cultures throughout history. In Dice, Cards, Wheels, Thomas M. Kavanagh scrutinizes the changing face of the gambler in France over a period of eight centuries, using gambling and its representations in literature as a lens through which to observe French culture. Kavanagh argues that the way people gamble tells us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that define a period or class. To gamble is to enter a world traced out by the rules and protocols of the game the gambler plays. That world may be an alternative to the established order, but the shape and structure of the game reveal indirectly hidden tensions, fears, and prohibitions.Drawing on literature from the Middle Ages to the present, Kavanagh reconstructs the figure of the gambler and his evolving personae. He examines, among other examples, Bodel's dicing in a twelfth-century tavern for the conversion of the Muslim world; Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize; the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff; and Balzac's, Barbey d'Aurevilly's, and Bourget's nineteenth-century revisions of the gambler.Dice, Cards, Wheels embraces the tremendous breadth of French history and emerges as a broad-ranging study of the different forms of gambling, from the dice games of the Middle Ages to the digital slot machines of the twenty-first century, and what those games tell us about French culture and history.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)