Holiday Poetics: An Introduction

Abstract

When considering modern and contemporary summer holidays as a social phenomenon, there might be a temptation to read them solely as a buoyant ramification of late capitalist habits, a garish bourgeois mass entertainment institution as futile and platitudinous as can be, leading to acritical tourism, hypertrophied infrastructural developments, dishonestly overpriced meals, and cheesy events aiming at a shallow carefree amusement. The history and cultural role of this fundamental recurring experience is, however, much more complex and significative than this clichéd portrait might reveal, and its legal birth in the modern age is the result of paramount rights arduously claimed by the European working classes in the interwar period.