The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901

• Main Author: Liedke, Heidi (Author, http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut)
• Corporate Author: SpringerLink (Online service)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
• Edition: 1st ed. 2018.
• Subjects: Literature, Modern-19th century.; Nineteenth-Century Literature.

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 characteriz...

Table of 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.