For financial and personal reasons, Eliot was keen that Adam Bede should be popular, but that aspiration necessarily brought the novel into competition both with popular culture and the popular fiction by women that Eliot had criticised in 1856. Adam Bede explicitly recognises the challenges of its publishing context, and seeks, whilst exploiting some of the interests of popular fiction, to educate its readers both about the responsibilities of the novelist and their fiction to practise a responsible form of realism, and the readers’ own capacity for more substantial fare. The overwhelming popularity of Mrs Poyser and her home-spun wisdom sites the novel’s popularity in the nostalgic appeal of country life, but primarily, as the reviewer Anne Mozley argues, in its developing the reader’s sympathy with ordinary people, and in establishing a link with the reader based in the harmonious creation of memories of familiar places and emotions.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

Modern Hebrew literature has been driven by a call to productivity from its inception. Zionist history was born out of a break with its traditional and religious past, a historical transformation that coincided with the birth and perseverance of the productive Jew. However, even well into twentieth and twenty-first-century Hebrew literature, these tensions remain active. They illuminate not only the ways in which capitalization and secularization are ongoing processes but also latent yet available possibilities of resistance to the demands of productivity. The chapter focuses on the figure of the Shabbat and other forms of inoperativity and nonwork inherent within it in the poetry of Zelda Schneurson. It offers a reading of Zelda’s poetry from a materialist and political-theological perspective to locate her poetry and her depictions of nonwork within the intertwined histories of Zionism, secularism, and capitalism.

This chapter considers the meanings of human labor in the work of three Bloomsbury writers: John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. The psychological and social potential of “idleness” is discussed with reference to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of Peace and his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he argues that in future, society will see a radical reduction in working hours. Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” is also analyzed in relation to his argument that “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all.” These positions are contrasted with Woolf’s explorations of the increasing access of women to professional work. Woolf’s focus is not on the liberatory potential of “idleness” but rather on the continuing barriers to productive work faced by women in the period. The chapter concludes that while for Keynes and Russell “idleness” offered an opportunity to live a more meaningful and free life, for Woolf the recent entry of women to the professions offered important new opportunities for individual agency and financial autonomy through work.

Although residents of The Villages often say, "You name it, they have a club for it, and if they don’t, you can start one," moving to the city frequently necessitates quitting or reducing involvement in existing activities. Additionally, aging presents various challenges to participation, such as declining health and lack of companionship. Based on the ecological model of leisure constraints, this chapter explores how residents navigate these conditions, why some choose not to negotiate them, and how the vast array of activities in The Villages both supports and hinders successful negotiation.

After outlining the history of The Villages from its origins as a trailer park in the late 1960s to its present status, this chapter examines the factors behind its success. This discussion covers the unique master planning of the community, the extensive variety of leisure activities available to residents, and the population’s relative homogeneity. By distinguishing between the place and its residents, the chapter also reviews previous research on The Villages and identifies the gaps in the existing knowledge that this book aims to fill.

With 115 recreation centers, 3,000 clubs, numerous activities, and media content that encourages residents to “Try something new!” The Villages actively promotes innovation in later life. Drawing on innovation theory, this chapter examines the continuity and change in residents’ leisure activities upon moving to The Villages and over time. It describes what can be termed an "innovation culture" while also noting that innovation tends to decline with age and pointing to a greater tendency towards self-preservation rather than self-reinvention innovation.

This chapter addresses the challenge of socially "starting from scratch" when moving into a community of approximately 150,000 older adults. It suggests that most residents integrate into overlapping place-, leisure-, and faith-based communities, and experience varying levels of psychological sense of community (PSOC). The chapter also explores the few instances where no PSOC was reported and examines the multiple tensions between different groups based on age, type of residency, and political orientation.

This chapter considers the relationship between masculinity, work, and the body in Hopkins’s poetry, focussing in particular on the idealization of working-class bodies in ‘Felix Randal’, ‘Harry Ploughman’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’. It explores Hopkins’s engagement with the ‘Gospel of Work’ in the nineteenth century, situating his works alongside that of writers such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. It also examines the significance of broader social developments in the period: the rise of ‘muscular Christianity’, the socialist unrest of the late 1880s, and increasing medical concerns about overwork and leisure. The final section turns to Hopkins’s journals to consider his preoccupation with forms of productive labour, especially as this relates to self-regulation and sexual continence. In closing, the chapter considers Hopkins’s fraught engagement with the poetry of Walt Whitman and its eroticized representations of the male body.

Chapter 3 focuses on the kinds of domestic duties expected of women in gentle, noble, and royal establishments and thus offers an understanding of everyday life in a late medieval elite household. The range of activities required of highborn household servants was broad, encompassing both public and private obligations. They saw to their queens’ or noblewomen’s personal needs in terms of apparel, entertainment, and piety. They traveled when duties demanded it and assisted their queens and ladies with medical care. To perform these tasks, they were entrusted with significant household resources and also, sometimes, care and custody of royal and noble children. Over years of service, through daily serving the needs of their employers, some serving women and their mistresses developed affectionate relationships as they shared literary tastes and devotional practices. Their employment provided opportunities for elite female servants to live a sumptuous lifestyle surrounded by luxury and entertainments, and also to network with other courtiers. I argue that investigating the domestic duties and daily lives of these often-overlooked women completes our understanding of courts and great households by showing the importance of female employment in the Middle Ages.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become essential for qualitative researchers to adopt online interviews for data collection. However, ensuring the validity of the interview protocol is no easy task, especially when the research involves people with intellectual disabilities. With these unique challenges, we attempted to validate the interview protocol to ensure the trustworthiness of the data. An online semi-structured interview protocol was developed and refined by integrating the Interview Protocol Refinement (IPR) Framework into a seven-step refinement process. A pilot test was conducted via video conference with five participants across five different groups. From the current pilot test, insights gained include (1) rephrasing the interview questions to assume casual conversation; (2) having a contingency plan in case of technical failure; (3) refining probes and follow-up questions; and (4) enhancing the reliability of proxy in interviewing person with Down syndrome. It is essential to develop a valid and reliable interview protocol to ensure a trustworthy qualitative finding. The process should be reflective and reiterative and should always be done in such a manner.

Focused on metropolitan consumer centres in which new sexual identities were bought and sold, this chapter explores how mass-market businesses stimulated, satisfied, and contained female desires, often at the same time. Consumer behaviours are a nexus of bodily and psychic desires understood through a language of seduction. Since the mid-nineteenth century, businesses have channelled, commodified, and promoted female sexuality to sell new products, shopping spaces, and leisure activities. Cities offered both licit and illicit, sexual and consumer pleasures. Their urban geographies are the living proof of our argument that in modern capitalist societies, sexuality is a commodity, commodities often are erotic, and the spaces and communities in which they are exchanged contribute to the making of consumer and sexual subjectivities. The marketing of eros therefore did not simply emerge with the twentieth-century sexual revolution, but rather was central to the history of modern capitalism. By examining the overlapping histories of the marketing of female consumer and sexual pleasures in diverse places, this chapter explores the role of sex and sexiness in the modern marketplace and challenges liberal assumptions about agency, liberation, and progress embedded in the history of the sexual revolutions of the late twentieth century.

This chapter introduces key structures and developments in the cities of late antique southern Gaul as relevant as contexts for the development of popular culture at this time, with reference to archaeological as well as literary evidence. While Arles and Marseille come under particular focus, other smaller urban centres including Aix and Narbonne are also considered. The general built urban environment is discussed first, then the occupations, social status and identities of the cities’ inhabitants. Next, the impact of the church upon the late ancient city, social and political as well as topographical, comes into focus. Urban social relations are examined before the final section looks at the transformation of performance and leisure in late antiquity.