Abstract
The Coda begins with a psychogeographic assessment of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” as a twentieth-century continuation of Victorian idling, thus suggesting that idling, as it is developed in this book, anticipated forms of mobility in the twentieth century. As such, Liedke sums up her book as having made the claim for Victorian idlers as late-Romantics; yet on the other hand, they attest an individualistic need to affirm their selves against the dangers of alienating surroundings and are as such inherently modern or even proto-Modernist. To be idle has been and is now again a precarious state; idling has been and is a risk. The chapter concludes that this book has identified the first point in history when idling as a late-Romantic tradition clashed with the first forms of modernity as we understand it today centred around the notions of efficiency, speed and space-time-compression.
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Liedke, H. (2018). Coda. In: The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95861-3_12
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