Untitled

Preface Preface and and Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
This volume brings together a substantial range of essays on the history of
European leisure culture from the late eighteenth century to the present. As the
contributors make clear, although the historiography of leisure is quite developed,
it is also uneven, with respect both to the time periods and countries it has studied
as well as to the subjects it has emphasized. This volume does not claim to be a
comprehensive rejoinder to the oversights or exaggerations of previous scholarship.
Indeed, a central premise of the volume is that the history of leisure culture
eludes a fully definitive or synthetic treatment; it consists of multiple temporalities
and concatenations whose shape and content shift with reference to an array of
political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental forces. Nonetheless, broad
patterns of change and continuity do appear, and the tripartite structure of seeing,
traveling, and consuming offers one approach to discerning them, at least for the
purpose of categorization and discussion. This volume brings together some of the
most innovative scholarship in the historical study of leisure practices available at
present. It is hoped that it will serve readers as a kind of benchmark for current
thinking on a most lively and changing topic.
This project would have been impossible without Maike Bohn, who suggested
the idea, and Kathryn Earle, who has encouraged, advised, and recruited with
characteristic energy and insight. I thank them both, as well as the editorial staff
of Berg, for their valuable and unflagging assistance.
vii
Rudy Koshar