La riscoperta dell’ozio nella letteratura inglese di fine Ottocento: Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome K. Jerome, Oscar Wilde

The Victorian era is often considered to have been dominated by the 'Gospel of work', that is, the ideology that identified work as one of the supreme virtues. However, starting from about the 1870s, this ideology started to be more and more radically questioned by several writers who claimed in favour of idleness. In this essay, I analyse and compare three of the most relevant British partisans of idleness of the period – Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome K. Jerome and Oscar Wilde –, in order to show how idleness played a key role in the development of their poetic and how they contributed to its reevaluation as an alternative value for the modern times