Well Met

Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture

By: Rachel Lee Rubin

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Hardcover | 19 December 2012

At a Glance

Hardcover
359 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 2.39

Hardcover

RRP $152.00

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The Renaissance Faire'a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring'receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major 'family friendly' leisure site in the 2000s, Well Met tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the Faire.

Well Met approaches the Faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. Drawing upon vibrant interview material and deep archival research, Rachel Lee Rubin reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible counter cultural referendum on how we live now'our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments.

In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants,both workers and visitors, Rubin has compiled a dazzling array of testimony, from extensive conversations with Faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and 'playtrons.' Well Met pays equal attention what came out of the faire'the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire's innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with 'ethnic' musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire. Original, intrepid, and richly illustrated, Well Met puts the Renaissance Faire back at the historical center of the American counterculture.

Industry Reviews

"Rubin (American studies, Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; Immigration and Popular Culture) focuses on the faire as phenomenon, and while the book presents an in-depth look at its 50-year existence, it's with an eye toward exploring its continued place in the counterculture and its significant effects on subcultural movements in music, crafts, and theater... The results are a must read for anyone interested in a nonstereotypical view of the faire, its adherents, and why it retains its appeal decades after its inception." Library Journal, October 2012 "The fascinating, forthcoming Well-Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture (NYU Press, release date November 19), a study of the phenomenon and its political and cultural echoes by Rubin -- a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston -- just might temper any Renaissance indigestion. Its deep and compelling tale of the Faire's reach, much of it emanating from a specifically Californian aesthetic of soft-golden attitudes and ecstatic liberal expression, certainly had me revisiting some of my own preconceptions, even yearning to be part of the revelry. Somebody polish me a codpiece!" San Fransisco Bay Guardian, October 2012 "[C]areful, informative, and thought-provoking...Well Met is packed with welcome detours into fascinating historical byways." - Slate.com "Rachel Lee Rubin is good on the analogies, and overlaps, between 'rennies' and other communities, from science fiction fans to sexual fetishists...Rubin's survey of fairs in popular culture is for the most part exhaustive... Ultimately - and the strength of Rachel Lee Rubin's book is that she understands and celebrates this - the point of Renaissance fairs is that a lot of people find pleasure in them." - Roz Kaveney, Times Literary Supplement, 22nd March 2013 "Readers who had always intuited a connection between the sixties counterculture and the faire, but who lacked the details, will find their curiosity sated. Those hoping for a holistic appraisal of a faire network that remains rambunctiously alive will be even more pleased." - Terry Wagner (Louisiana State University), H-1960s

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