Full Description
In the wake of the American and French revolutions, European culture saw the evolution of a new leisure regime never previously enjoyed. Now we speak of modern leisure societies, but the history of leisure, its experiences and expectations, its scope and variability, still remains largely a matter of conjecture. One message that has emerged from a multiplicity of disciplines is that research on leisure and consumption opens up a hitherto untapped mine of information on the broader issues of politics, society, culture and economics. How have leisure regimes in Europe evolved since the eighteenth century? Why has leisure culture crystallized around particular practices, sites and objects? Above all, what sorts of connections and meanings have been inscribed in leisure practices, and how might these be compared across time and space? This book is the first to provide an historical overview of modern leisure in a wide range of manifestations: travel, entertainment, sports, fashion, 'taste' and much more.
It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to know more about European history and culture or simply how people spent their free time before the age of television and the internet.
Contents
Contents: Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Seeing, Traveling and Consuming: An Introduction, Rudy Koshar Part 1: Seeing 2. Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction, Nick Prior 3. The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England, Marius Kwint 4. Flaneurs in Paris and Berlin, Esther Leslie 5. Crowd Control: Boxing Spectatorship and Social Order in Weimar Germany, Erik Jensen Part 2: Traveling 6. Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian England, Jan Palmowski 7. Bicycling, Class and the Politics of Leisure in Belle Epoque France, Christopher S. Thompson 8. "Every German visitor has a volkisch obligation he must fulfill": Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880-1918, Pieter Judson 9. La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring Club de France and the French Regions, 1890-1918, Patrick Young 10. The Michelin Red Guides: Social Differentiation in Early-Twentieth-Century French Tourism, Stephen L. Harp 11. Germans at the Wheel: Cars and Leisure Travel in Interwar Germany, Rudy Koshar Part 3: Consuming 12. Confessional Drinking@ Catholic Morkingmen's Clubs and Alcohol Consumption in Wilhelmine Germany, Robert Goodrich 13. "As i walked along the Bois de Boulogne": Subversive Performances and Masculine Pleasures in Fin-de-Siecle London, Christopher Breward 14. "Jewish Taste?": Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1920-1942, Leora Auslander 15. Leisure, Politics and the Consumption of Tabacco in Britain since the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Hilton 16. Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy, Stephen Gundle Index
