Paperback
Humanity’s urge to celebrate: a wild, joyous journey through history.

Dancing In The Streets

A History Of Collective Joy

$26.70

  • Paperback

    336 pages

  • Release Date

    1 July 2008

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Summary

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and savage, Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks’ worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as a danced religion. Exhilarating in its scholarly range, humane, witty and impassioned, Dancing in the Streets will generate debate and soul searching.

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781847080080
ISBN-10:1847080081
Author:Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher:Granta Books
Imprint:Granta Books
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:336
Edition:1st
Release Date:1 July 2008
Weight:232g
Dimensions:19mm x 129mm x 198mm
A-Format
B-Format
Dancing In The Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich - ISBN: 9781847080080
129 × 198 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Witty and quizzical … Her lightness of touch is commendable – Simon Callow * Guardian *
Dancing in the Streets is a genuine triumph of popular critical scholarship - the punchy elegance of her prose makes this an essential purchase * Independent *
A sparkling history of mass festivity, from Dionysian cults through ecstatic slave rites to rock’n’roll, it also, in sober vein, records its suppression and containment by disquieted elites and concludes with meditations on some deep-seated troubles of our own age – Gareth Dale * Times Higher Education Supplement *

About The Author

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in New York State.

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