Download or read book The Anxieties of Idleness written by Sarah Jordan and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed was industriousness. However, this claim was undermined and complicated by many factors, such as leisure's importance to class status. Thus idleness was a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of those members of society with less power to wield: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women. Jordan analyzes how the "idleness" of these groups is figured, in traditional literature and in extra-literary works. Idleness was also a concern for writers of the day, as writing became a money-earning profession. Jordan examines the lives and works of two writers especially obsessed with idleness, Samuel Johnson and William Cowper.
Download or read book Idleness written by Brian O'Connor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness, the first book to challenge modern philosophy's portrayal of inactivity, Brian O'Connor argues that the case against an indifference to work and effort is flawed--and that idle aimlessness may instead allow for the highest form of freedom. Idleness explores how some of the most influential modern philosophers drew a direct connection between making the most of our humanity and avoiding laziness. Idleness was dismissed as contrary to the need people have to become autonomous and make whole, integrated beings of themselves (Kant); to be useful (Kant and Hegel); to accept communal norms (Hegel); to contribute to the social good by working (Marx); and to avoid boredom (Schopenhauer and de Beauvoir). O'Connor throws doubt on all these arguments, presenting a sympathetic vision of the inactive and unserious that draws on more productive ideas about idleness, from ancient Greece through Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Schiller and Marcuse's thoughts about the importance of play, and recent critiques of the cult of work. A thought-provoking reconsideration of productivity for the twenty-first century, Idleness shows that, from now on, no theory of what it means to have a free mind can exclude idleness from the conversation."--Provided by publisher
Download or read book Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson written by Roze Hentschell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.
Download or read book The Hangover written by Jonathon Shears and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is ahangover? How does it feel to suffer from one? What can hangovers tell us aboutthe way attitudes to alcohol have developed over time? This book sets out toanswer these questions and many others by examining 'hangover literature' fromthe Renaissance to the present day.
Download or read book Idle Threats written by Andrew Lyndon Knighton and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-10-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” capturing the imagination o fa country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material and multifaceted literary and cultural sources, Idle Threats connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge,the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. Andrew Lyndon Knighton offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged “productivity of the unproductive,” revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.
Download or read book The theory of idle resources written by William Harold Hutt and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1977 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Wride and Wesley s Methodist Connexion written by Clive Murray Norris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the life and writings of an itinerant preacher in John Wesley’s Methodist Connexion, Thomas Wride (1733-1807). Detailed studies of such rank and file preachers are rare, as Methodist history has largely been written by and about its leadership. However, Wride’s ministry shows us that the development of this worldwide movement was more complicated and uncertain than many accounts suggest. Wride’s attitude was distinctive. He was no respecter of persons, freely criticising almost everyone he came across, and in doing so exposing debates and tensions within both Methodism and wider society. However, being so combative also led him into conflict with the very movement he sought to promote. Wride is an authentic, self-educated, and non-élite voice that illuminates important features of Eighteenth-Century life well beyond his religious activities. He sheds light on his contemporaries’ attitudes to issues such as the role of women, attitudes towards and the practice of medicine, and the experience and interpretation of dreams and supernatural occurrences. This is a detailed insight into the everyday reality of being an Eighteenth-Century Methodist minister. As such, this text will be of interest to academics working in Methodist Studies and Religious History, as well as Eighteenth-Century History more generally.
Download or read book Invested with Meaning written by Shannon Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1998-06-29 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing decades of the sixteenth century, England attempted its first colonial expansion into the New World through planned settlements in Ireland, Newfoundland, Virginia, and Guiana. All of these colonial efforts were unsuccessful. Yet these projects were a significant cultural force in early modern England. Influenced by recent work in postcolonial theory and cultural studies, Shannon Miller's Invested with Meaning examines the documentary and material remains of these vanished colonies to explore the multiple influences of the Irish and New World encounters on English culture. Miller contends that the projects sponsored by the Raleigh circle were inextricably bound to the economic and social transformations of English systems, including the transition from a feudal-based economy to an emergent capitalism, the redefinition of the patron-client relationship, and challenges to the categories of gentry and merchant. These social and economic transitions shaped the goals of the colonization projects and dictated the ways in which the writers and artists of these enterprises could frame the New World and its people; influenced by the changes in England, their construction of the New World both reflected and helped to constitute a sense of English national identity.
Download or read book Idle Hours in a Library written by William Henry Hudson and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: Idle Hours in a Library by William Henry Hudson
Download or read book A Companion to Renaissance Poetry written by Catherine Bates and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520–1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres—epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. • Covers a wide selection of authors and texts • Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe • Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.
Download or read book Time and Ways of Knowing Under Louis XIV written by Roland Racevskis and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the measurement and understanding of time in seventeenth-century Europe, particularly in France. Close readings of literary representations of time in Moliere, Mme de Sevigne, and Mmd de Lafayette are contextualized with historical studies of court life under Louis XIV, the restructuring of the early modern French postal system, and the emergencce of new practices of periodical publication, respectively. An epistemological backdrop for these historical and literary studies is provided by an introductory analysis of developments in the science of time measurement under Louis XIV. A concluding section places questions of human temporality in the contemporary context of global environmental concerns.
Download or read book Labour of Laziness in Twentieth Century American Literature written by Ladyga Zuzanna Ladyga and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses the theme of laziness in twentieth-century American LiteratureUncovers the ethical dimension of the writing of Stein, Hemingway, Barth, Barthelme and Wallace by situating them in the context of the 20th century non-normative ethical and aesthetic traditionShows how the Romantic interest in laziness plays out through the modernist and postmodernist moments in 20th century American literatureOffers an innovative model of ethical reading based on the concept of unproductivity as an alternative to the dominant post-Romantic trends in the field of ethical criticismPresents the first comprehensive study of laziness as a theoretical concept, which draws on a range of religious and philosophical references points, spanning John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Catherine MalabouThe Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on the issue of productivity, using the figure of laziness to negotiate the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic. This book argues that major twentieth-century American writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace provocatively challenge the ethos of productivity by filtering their ethical interventions through culturally stigmatised imagery of laziness. Ladyga argues that when the motif of laziness appears, it invariably reveals the underpinnings of an emerging value system at a given historical moment, while at the same time offering a glimpse into the strategies of rebelling against the status quo.
Download or read book Sleep and the Novel written by Michael Greaney and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-04 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a “sleeping partner”, one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or “sleep-novel”, whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel.
Download or read book On Demand written by David Baker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. On Demand draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time . William Shakespeare satirized credit problems. Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade, and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.
Download or read book The Deepest Sense written by Constance Classen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical exploration. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the middle ages to modernity. This intimate and sensuous approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture--the ways in which feelings shaped society. Constance Classen explores a variety of tactile realms including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. She delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses--and prohibitions--of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity. Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.
Download or read book Lazy Idle Schemers written by Gregory Dobbins and published by Field Day Publications. This book was released on 2010 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory Dobbins argues that the cultural politics of Irish modernism lie precisely in its engagement with the concept of idleness.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson After 300 Years written by Greg Clingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To mark the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson's birth in 2009, the specially-commissioned essays contained here review his scholarly reputation. An international team of experts reflects authoritatively on the various dimensions of literary, historical, critical and ethical life touched by Johnson's extraordinary achievement. The volume distinctively casts its net widely and combines consistently innovative thinking on Johnson's historical role with a fresh sense of present criticism. Chapters cover subjects as diverse as Johnson's moral philosophy, his legal thought, his influence on Jane Austen, and the question of the Johnson canon. The contributors examine the larger theoretical and scholarly contexts in which it is now possible to situate his work, and from which it may often be necessary to differentiate it. All the contributors have a distinguished record of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies, Johnson scholarship, and cultural history and theory.
