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.
**
Fiction & Literature
Literary Theory & Criticism

upload/motw_shc_2025_10/shc/The Experience of Idling in Vic - Heidi Liedke.epub

motw/The Experience of Idling in Vic - Heidi Liedke.epub

motw/The Experience of Idling in Vic - Heidi Liedke.pdf

Liedke, Heidi

Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Switzerland, Switzerland

1, 20180802

Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

The Composition Context of Idle Days in PatagoniaEnforced Idleness Becomes Desired Idleness-Patagonia as Liminal Space; Re-subjectification Through Watchfulness; Textual "Speed Bumps," or Portable Idleness; References; Chapter 9 Jerome K. Jerome's Humoristic Idleness in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) (1889): Lightness and Longing; Popularising 'Thamesland' as a Space for Careless Idling; Work, Progress and (Sentimental) Idleness in Three Men in a Boat; Physicality and (Slow) Travel; Too Much of an Idler to Be Original? Jerome and Dickens Jr.'s Dictionary of the Thames

Sightseeing vs. SeeingIn the Semantic Spotlight: The Development of the Verb 'To Gipsy'; Virtual Forms of Travel; Travelling "On the Inside"; River Journeys and Their Representations: Dickens and Banvard; References; Chapter 4 The Dangers of Idle Time; Why Guidebooks Are Like Goggles; The Problem of Idle Time; The Victorian Attitude Towards Travel: Leisure or Work?; References; Chapter 5 Genre and Gender; Travel Writing as a Late-Romantic Genre; The Connection Between Gender, Travel and Idleness; Idleness as a Gendered Concept; Precarious Idleness; References; Part II Case Studies

Chapter 6 The Victorian Idler's Late-Romantic MentalityThree Dimensions of Re-subjectification: Readiness, Thereness and Dynamic Perception; Categories of Rendering the Experience of Idleness in Travelogues; References; Chapter 7 Idleness and Idling in Anna Mary Howitt's An Art-Student in Munich (1853); Written Pictures and Exaggerations; The Orchestration of Colour and the Receptive Art-Student Gaze; Experiencing Spaces of Idleness; Creating a Personal Cityscape; References; Chapter 8 W.H. Hudson, His Thinking Machine and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893)

2025-10-27