This book centralizes powerful leisure stories that may otherwise be understood as myths—sometimes recognized, often less so—that circulate in the field of leisure studies and beyond. In everyday use, a myth perpetuates a popularly held belief that is false or untrue. However, in social and cultural theories, myths are more complex as partial truths that privilege particular versions of a shared social reality. We see myth as having an “absent presence” in leisure studies, and want to know what myths are, what they do, and how they circulate and shape people’s leisure lives. Myths can do more than obfuscate; they often animate people’s lives, motivate collective action, and inspire change. As the chapters in this edited volume explore in further detail, leisure myths and mythmaking involve complex relations in the gaps between reality and imagination—from the shared myths of musical legends to myths of placemaking and communities, as well as from origin myths of sport practices to fantasy and festivals, to the importance of storytelling as mythmaking in tourism. In different ways, each of these chapters alerts the readers to the “absent presence” of myths and mythmaking in leisure research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Leisure Sciences.

An indispensable overview of the evolution of myth, from ancient Greek definitions to those of contemporary thinkers.

This book brings together contributions that analyse how subcultural myths develop and how they can be studied. Through critical engagement with (history) writing and other sources on subcultures by contemporaries, veterans, popular media and researchers, it aims to establish: how stories and histories of subcultures emerge and become canonized through the process of mythification; which developments and actors are crucial in this process; and finally how researchers like historians, sociologists, and anthropologists should deal with these myths and myth-making processes. By considering these issues and questions in relation to mythmaking, this book provides new insights on how to research the identity, history, and cultural memory of youth subcultures.

Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony]...and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enûma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and--with but one exception--a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucian, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.

This book is based on papers given at the 2nd Symposium on Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure (CPTHL) in Vienna in July 2000. The Symposium comprised papers reflecting the progress in consumer psychology theory and research. The Vienna Symposium put special emphasis on consumer decision making for evaluating choice alternatives in tourism, leisure, and hospitality operations. The reports have been arranged into five major compartments.