Leisure cultures in urban Europe, c.1700-1870

This collection of essays examines the history of urban leisure cultures in Europe during the transition from the early modern to the modern period. Bringing together research on a wide variety of activities - from the theatre and art exhibitions to spas, seaside resorts and games - it develops a new scholarly agenda for the history of leisure, focusing on the complex processes of cultural transfer that transformed urban leisure culture from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire. How did new models of urban leisure pastimes travel throughout Europe? Who were the main agents of cultural innovation, appropriation and adaptation? How did the increasingly entangled character of European urban leisure culture impact upon the ways men and women from various classes identified with their social, cultural or (proto-)national communities? These are some of the questions explored by this accessible and wide-ranging collection, which looks at leisure from a long-term, interdisciplinary and transnational perspective.

Introduction - Peter Borsay and Jan Hein FurnéeCharting the flows: institutions and genres1. Art in the urban public sphere: art venues by entrepreneurs, associations and institutions, 1800-50 - J. Pedro Lorente2. Melodrama in post-revolutionary Europe: the genealogy and diffusion of a 'popular' theatrical genre and experience, 1780-1830 - Carlotta Sorba3. Games and sports in the long eighteenth century: failures of transmission - Peter ClarkProcesses of selection and adaptation: actors and structures4. Georgian Bath: a transnational culture - Peter Borsay5. Music and opera in Brussels, 1700-1850: a tale of two cities - Koen Buyens6. Leisure culture, entrepreneurs and urban space: Swedish towns in a European perspective, eighteenth to nineteenth centuries - Dag Lindström7. Coffeehouses: leisure and sociability in Ottoman Istanbul - Cengiz KirliTowards an 'entangled history' of urban leisure culture8. The rules of leisure in eighteenth-century Paris and London - Laurent Turcot9. City of pleasure or 'ville des plaisirs'? Urban leisure culture exchanges between England and France through travel writing, 1700-1820 - Clarisse Coulomb10. The role of inland spas in the production of European leisure culture, 1750-1870 - Jill Stewart11. Coastal resorts and cultural exchange in Europe, 1780-1870 - John K. WaltonIndex