Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature

1. Introduction
Monika Fludernik, Miriam Nandi

2. Otium, Negotium, and the Fear of Acedia in the Writings of England’s Late Medieval Ricardian Poets
Gregory M. Sadlek

3. The Dangers and Pleasures of Filling Vacuous Time: Idleness in Early Modern Diaries
Miriam Nandi

4. The ‘Sweet Toyle’ of Blissful Bowers: Arresting Idleness in the English Renaissance
Abigail Scherer

5. Idleness, Apprentices and Machines in Deloney and Dekker
Emily Anglin

6. Idleness, Class and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century
Sarah Jordan

7. The Performativity of Idleness: Representations and Stagings of Idleness in the Context of Colonialism
Monika Fludernik

8. Dramas of Idleness: The Comedy of Manners in the Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde
Kerstin Fest

9. Idleness and Creativity: Poetic Disquisitions on Idleness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Richard Adelman

10. Versions of Working-Class Idleness: Non-Productivity and the Critique of Victorian Workaholism
Benjamin Kohlmann

11. Against Busyness: Idling in Victorian and Contemporary Travel Writing
Barbara Korte

12. Tramping: The Cult of the Vagabond in Early Twentieth-Century England
Simon Featherstone

13. Englishness, Summer and the Pastoral of Country Leisure in Twentieth-Century Literature
Leonie Wanitzek

14. Sociology of Leisure and the Wars of the Lifestyle Gurus
Ken Roberts

15. Epilogue: Remember that Time Is Knowledge, Health and Happiness: On the Mysterious Disappearance of Leisure
Hartmut Rosa

Keywords: Literature, British and Irish Literature, Literary Theory, Cultural Theory, Cultural History, Sociology of Culture, Poetry and Poetics