Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in by Andrew Lyndon Knighton

By Andrew Lyndon Knighton

The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of writing approximately unproductivity, with the exploits of assorted idlers, loafers, and “gentlemen of refinement” taking pictures the mind's eye o fa nation that was once deeply ambivalent approximately its paintings ethic. Idle Threats files this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, whereas supplying an evidence of the profound value of idle practices for literary and cultural production.
 
While this fascination with unproductivity memorably outlined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it additionally reverberated deeply throughout the whole tradition, either as a seductive perfect and as a very likely corrosive hazard to upright, industrious American males. Drawing on a powerful array of archival fabric and multifaceted literary and cultural resources, Idle Threats connects the query of unproductivity to different discourses referring to manhood, the price of paintings, the attract of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge,the which means of individuality, and the event of time, house, and heritage. Andrew Lyndon Knighton bargains a brand new state of mind in regards to the principally unacknowledged “productivity of the unproductive,” revealing the incalculable and occasionally extraordinary ways that American modernity remodeled the connection among matters and that that's so much intimate to them: their very own job.

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