This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that ‘idleness’ is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of ‘the Victorians’ as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to ‘re-subjectification’ and the assertion of a ‘late-Romantic’ sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.

This significant contribution to the study of the live and recorded broadcasting of stage plays focuses on National Theatre Live a decade after its launch in 2009. Assessing livecasting through the concepts of spectacle, materiality and engagement, it examines the role played by audiences in livecasting. Illustrated by in-depth analyses of recent NT Live shows, including A Midsummer Night's Dream (2019), Antony and Cleopatra (2018) and Small Island (2019), the book is complemented by insights from practitioners involved in the making of the livecasts. Finally, livecasting is contextualized within recently emerged forms of Covidian (virtual) theatre during the pandemic in order to offer some thoughts on the future of the genre of theatrical performance. Combining lively analyses of recent theatre performances with auto-ethnographic accounts, Heidi Lucja Liedke turns to 20th-century thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in order to understand livecasting's place in a continuum of developments taking place on the borders of media, film and performance for the past 100 years. As well as embedding livecasting in its historical context of 19th-century electrophone technology, Liedke assesses its position in contemporary discourses on the meaning of theatre for spectators in the pre- and post-pandemic moment, and points towards the form's future.