Full Description
Invisible Seasides positions the seaside as a lens for understanding lived utopia, pinned in a certain place, an immovable feature in a landscape where our hopes and fears continue to unfold. Wide-ranging in theme, it brings a double perspective, past and present, to bear on how we understand contemporary seaside experience.
Presenting a magical paradox of the modern seaside, this book traces the development of a cultural phenomenon from the mid-1800s to the present day. In the process, it modifies the accepted narrative about its rise and fall, reappraising our understanding of the end of a Mass Utopia, and shining new light on the diversity of post-utopias that have emerged in its afterlife.
Fusing social theory, social history, and leisure studies, its thesis adroitly envisions the diverse density of the seaside through a critical lens, making the unfamiliar familiar and vice versa, providing us with an exemplar for a different way of thinking sociologically, which will be used by scholars from a range of different subject fields to encourage fresh reflection on social continuity and change.
Contents
Introduction: understanding the modern seaside as a utopian phenomenon
PART I. Seaside utopia as a methodological problem
1. Deconstructing procedures of empirical investigation
2. Some alternative uses of leisure
3. The problem with social histories of the modern seaside and what to do about it
PART II. From birth to death and beyond: a short history of Seaside Utopia
4. The origins of Seaside Utopia
5. The democratization of Seaside Utopia
6. The end of Seaside Utopia
PART III. Post-utopias of the twenty-first century seaside
7. Seaside Utopia recollected and redesigned: retrotopia
8. The seaside's permanent present: redotopia
9. An aetiology of the seaside's hidden heterotopias
10. Representing seaside heterotopia: urbex performa-spheres and surfing value-spheres
11. In search of home: the private paradises of seaside oikotopia
Epilogue
