Abstract
As Great Britain came increasingly to define itself as a nation during the long eighteenth century, one important claim it made for itself was that it was industrious. However, this claim was undermined and complicated by many factors, such as the place of leisure as a marker of class status. Thus, idleness was a subject of intense anxiety for the eighteenth-century British; and a preoccupation with idleness reveals itself in a wide range of eighteenth-century texts, from economic tracts to conduct books to poetry, essays and novels.
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© 2014 Sarah Jordan
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Jordan, S. (2014). Idleness, Class and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Fludernik, M., Nandi, M. (eds) Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137404008_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137404008_6
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