Etiquette and Courtesy

A popular genre from colonial times to 1900, the conduct book provides the youthful reader with authoritative guidance about right moral, religious, and gender role behavior. With the aim of teaching the young what they need to know--and believe--about society's expectations for the ideal young man and woman, the genre codified "true" American manhood and womanhood. This guide provides an analytic and historical overview of the conduct book and its cultural work in America. With an annotated bibliography of over 500 books, it provides easy and direct access to conduct books for adults of each sex and for children.

Gotz examines a major cause of violence in society--the loss of respect for our neighbors evidenced by the decline of manners and courtesy. A major focus is the school's failure to instill respect and its promise as an instrument for its recovery.

Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance is an interdisciplinary study of etiquette texts, conduct literature, and advice books and films. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster analyzes the work of such women authors as Emily Post, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Webster Foster, Emily Bronte, Frances E. W. Harper, and Martha Stewart as well as such women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Kasi Lemmons.

"Specifically", Foster notes, "I was interested in the possibility of locating power and agency in the voices of popular etiquette writers". Her investigation led her to analyze etiquette and conduct literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Within this wide scope, she redefines the boundaries of conduct literature through a theoretical examination of the gendered body as it is positioned in conduct books, etiquette texts, poetry, fiction, and film.

Drawing on Bakhtin, Gates, Foucault, and the new school of performative feminism to develop an interdisciplinary approach to conduct literature -- and literature as conduct -- Foster brings a unique perspective to the analysis of ways in which the body has been gendered, raced, and constructed in terms of class and sexuality.

Even though women writers have been actively writing conduct and etiquette texts since the medieval period, few critical examinations of such literature exist in the fields of cultural studies and literary criticism. Thus, Foster's study fills a gap and does so uniquely in the existing literature. In examining these voices of authority over the body, Foster identifies the dialogic in the texts of this discipline that both supports and disrupts the hegemonic discourse of a gendered social order.

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language in its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including literature (particularly drama), questionnaires, and personal observation. She attempts to discover the principles underlying social interaction in both intracultural and intercultural contexts, and discusses the extent to which the concept of politeness is common to different cultures. She argues that politeness is conceptualized differently and thus manifested differently in the two societies under study: Greeks tend to use more 'positive' politeness devices than the English, who prefer more 'negative' devices. Positive politeness is more closely related to friendliness, negative politeness to formality. Dr Sifianou's analysis illustrates and supports the general claim that, despite popular stereotypes, there can be no objective verification for the view that one nation is more polite than another.

Wrapping Culture examines problems of intercultural communication and the possibilities for misinterpretation of the familiar in an unfamiliar context. Starting with an examination of Japanese gift-wrapping, Joy Hendry demonstrates how our expectations are often influenced by cultural factors which may blind us to an appreciation of underlying intent. She extends this approach to the study of polite language as the wrapping of thoughts and intentions, garments as body wrappings, constructions and gardens as wrapping of space. Hendry shows how this extends even to the ways in which people may be wrapped in seating arrangements, or meetings and drinking customs may be constrained by temporal versions of wrapping. Throughout the book, Hendry considers ways in which groups of people use such symbolic forms to impress and manipulate one another, and points out a Western tendency to underestimate such nonverbal communication, or reject it as mere decoration. She presents ideas that should be valid in any intercultural encounter and demonstrates that Japanese culture, so often thought of as a special case, can supply a model through which we can formulate general theories about human behaviour.