Thirteen Ways of Looking at Leisure

Reimagines its topic through Wallace Stevens’s radical aesthetics, recovering its ancient, transcendent essence to reveal that leisure is the basis of all eventful creative action: interpretation, culture, social life, and politics.

Why leisure? What for? Why thirteen ways of looking? On what grounds and on whose authority? Blackshaw answers these questions and more by advancing an original reading of this oldest of ideas and a constructive new conception for our era.

In this distinctive title, Tony Blackshaw revitalises the study of leisure, advancing an original reading of this oldest of ideas and a constructive new conception for our era. Using Wallace Stevens’s radical aesthetics and innovative style as a foil, he recovers something very old that alludes to the creative chaos of the cosmos before time and space, of what it is about leisure we continue to find magical, that draws us in, and enables us to step outside ourselves into an ekstasis, into another kind of world, which appears to have been lost in its academic study. Drawing on these insights, he carefully and skilfully transforms his subject to show that leisure is the basis of all eventful creative action: interpretation, culture, social life, and politics. Remarkably illuminating, this book brings back to scholarly awareness the old, to produce the new.