The Art of Idleness in Modern Literature
Journal: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University)
Year: 2023

This dissertation argues that literature, from the late nineteenth century forward, takes on an important but often unnoticed cultural role: as a counter-voice against the pressures of work. In this period, we can observe, in a wide range of authors, a sharpening interest in idleness as a zone of experience that invites aesthetic pleasure and that can serve as a holdout against the disfiguring pressures of the capitalist economy. The writers featured in this dissertation ascribe a new importance