Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain, 1880-1939

ISBN-13: 9781350003019 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 256 str.

Robert Snape

Opis

In the final decades of the 19th century, modernizing interpretations of leisure became of interest to social policy makers and cultural commentators, producing a discourse of leisure and voluntarism that flourished until the Second World War. Far from being a social problem, the free time of British citizens was increasingly seen as an agent of community-building and social citizenship. Through major social critics, including William Morris, Thomas Hill Green, Bernard Bosanquet and John Hobson, leisure was theorized in terms of the good society. These writers remained influential in post-First World War social reconstruction as leisure became a field of social service directed towards the good society, notably in the new estate community-centre and the village hall movements and through numerous voluntary organizations.This volume documents the parallel cultural shift from charitable philanthropy to social service and from rational recreation to leisure, teasing out intellectual influences which included social idealism, liberalism and socialism. Leisure, Snape claims, has been a central and under-recognised organizing force in British communities. Leisure, Voluntary Action and Social Change in Britain marks a much needed addition to the historiography of leisure and an antidote to the widely misunderstood implications of leisure to social policy today.