Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in.

This is a book about play - child's play, wordplay, stage plays, foul play. It criticizes existing theories of play, showing how the well-known accounts of Friedrich Schiller, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois and D. W. Winnicott are fatally compromised by their need to serve a myth of social and psychological progress. Play in a Godless World draws on philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis and deconstruction for an alternative account of play - one more attuned to the ironic spirit of modern times. Considering every aspect of play, from jokes and game theory to the lottery and Pascal's wager, it concludes that the stage plays of mimetic drama demonstrate human play at its most sophisticated and tragedy at its most sophisticated of all.

Catherine Bates currently teaches at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.