Taming of everyday life. Norms and practices of the new time

One of the most striking metaphors of the formation of modern Western society was proposed by the classic of sociology Norbert Elias: he wrote about the “taming” of the nobility by the royal court - an institution that formed a complex system of social codification, including a certain manner of behavior. Thanks to the training, which the European man of the New Age was subjected to, good manners later began to be perceived as something natural. The metaphor of Elias pops up whenever it comes to texts in which regulatory behavior models are recorded, whether it is textbooks of good manners or books about housekeeping: they all represent an attempt to tame everyday life, unify and systematize often unrelated practices. The book includes works dedicated to various methods of verbal and visual taming of reality, a gap between the rules of good tone and their practical application, problems of translation and adaptation of other people"s codes, genre characteristics of normative literature, etc. The authors of the collection are leading Russian researchers of history and culture: O. Weinstein, M. Velizhev, M. Mayofis, V. Milchin, M. Neklyudova and others.
Compiled by M. Neklyudova