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Full Description
This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that 'idleness' is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of 'the Victorians' as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to 're-subjectification' and the assertion of a 'late-Romantic' sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.
Contents
1. Introduction.- 2. A Brief Intellectual and Semantic History of 'Idleness'.- 3. Sensibilities of Seeing.- 4. The Dangers of Idle Time.- 5. Genre and Gender.- 6. The Victorian Idler's Late-Romantic Mentality.- 7. Idleness and Idling in Anna Mary Howitt's An Art Student in Munich (1853).- 8. W. H. Hudson, his Thinking Machine, and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893).- 9. Jerome K. Jerome's Humoristic Idleness in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) (1889): Lightness and Longing.- 10. Margaret Fountaine's Diary Accounts of her Restless Idling and Butterflying.- 11. George Gissing's By The Ionian Sea (1901) as a Paradise of Idleness.- 12. Coda.
