Leisure in the Industrial Revolution

Leisure in the Industrial Revolution
Author: Hugh Cunningham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317268733

First published in 1980. This book is a study of what different classes of society understood by leisure and how they enjoyed it. It argues that many of the assumptions which have underlain the history of leisure are misleading, and in particular the notions that there was a vacuum in popular leisure in the early Industrial Revolution; that with industrialisation there was sharp discontinuity with the past; that cultural forms diffuse themselves only down the social scale, and that leisure helped ease class distinctions. An alternative interpretation is suggested in which popular culture can be seen as an active agent as well as a victim. This title will be of interest to students of history.

The Amusement Park

The Amusement Park
Author: Jason Wood
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317045130

Jason Wood is Director of Heritage Consultancy Services, Lancaster, UK, and former Professor of Cultural Heritage at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 538
Release: 1823
Genre:
ISBN:

Containing original essays; historical narratives, biographical memoirs, sketches of society, topographical descriptions, novels and tales, anecdotes, select extracts from new and expensive works, the spirit of the public journals, discoveries in the arts and sciences, useful domestic hints, etc. etc. etc.

Dickens and Popular Entertainment

Dickens and Popular Entertainment
Author: Paul Schlicke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2003-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134997256

Dickens and Popular Entertainment is the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dicken's life and work. Ranging widely through showmen's memoirs, playbills, advertisements, journals, drawings and imaginative literature, Paul Schlicke explores the ways in which Dickens channelled his love of entertainment into incomparable artistry. Circus, fair, theatre and street performances provided the novelist with subject matter and with the sources of imaginative stimulus essential to his art. Splendidly illustrated with nineteenth-century engravings, many reprinted here for the first time, this study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the important place entertainment held in Dicken's journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life.

Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888-1929

Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888-1929
Author: Oliver Hochadel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317176200

The four decades between the two Universal Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929 were formative in the creation of modern Barcelona. Architecture and art blossomed in the work of Antoni Gaudi and many others. At the same time, social unrest tore the city apart. Topics such as art nouveau and anarchism have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Yet the crucial role of science, technology and medicine in the cultural makeup of the city has been largely ignored. The ten articles of this book recover the richness and complexity of the scientific culture of end of the century Barcelona. The authors explore a broad range of topics: zoological gardens, natural history museums, amusement parks, new medical specialities, the scientific practices of anarchists and spiritists, the medical geography of the urban underworld, early mass media, domestic electricity and astronomical observatories. They pay attention to the agenda of the bourgeois elites but also to hitherto neglected actors: users of electric technologies and radio amateurs, patients in clinics and dispensaries, collectors and visitors of museums, working class audiences of public talks and female mediums. Science, technology and medicine served to exert social control but also to voice social critique. Barcelona: An urban history of science and modernity (1888-1929) shows that the city around 1900 was both a creator and facilitator of knowledge but also a space substantially transformed by the appropriation of this knowledge by its unruly citizens.