Disreputable Pleasures (Paperback)
- Less Virtuous Victorians at Play

Beskrivelser af Disreputable Pleasures

Forlagets beskrivelse

Challenging the respectable image of Victorian society, this irreverent, revisionist collection explores the sinful side of middle-class Victorian leisure, highlighting the problematic relationship between public respectability and private pleasure.

Bibliotekernes beskrivelse

This irreverent and revisionist collection challenges the conventional view that middle-class Victorian leisure had a respectable and serious purpose and approach. It explores the more sinful and unrespectable Victorian male pleasures, demonstrating the complex interrelationships between such values as manliness, muscularity and machismo, or sensuality, virility and hedonism. It sheds light on the ways in which the public rhetoric of Victorian respectability could be rendered problematic by the practical pursuit of private pleasure. It shows that Victorian leisure was a much more contested cultural space than has been recognised. It was a battleground whose contestants ranged from the rational recreationalist to the avowedly hedonistic, and from the sacred to the profane.