Edited by two leading scholars in the field, Leisure Studies is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. It is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research in Leisure Studies.

The origin of Leisure Studies is comparatively recent. The subject is largely a postwar development which began to unfold in the 1960s, initially in the USA and Europe. The subject area has continued to evolve internationally from a number of other disciplines and cognate areas—such as outdoor recreation, geography, history, economics, and sociology—and there has been a corresponding growth in Leisure Studies scholarship. Leisure Studies is now a vibrant and dynamic field of study and research, and the sheer scale of the growth in its output makes this collection especially timely. A wide range of social science journals have published leisure-related material and this Major Work makes available foundational pieces of scholarship—as well as cutting-edge research—from these disparate, and sometimes less accessible sources, as well as from the leading UK, European, and North American leisure journals, and from other publications, some of which are no longer in print.

As well as bringing together the key studies and journal articles that have shaped leisure thought, the collection is to be welcomed as the first mapping of an area that to date has lacked an interdisciplinary synthesis. The thematic organization of the collection, together with the editors’ introductions and their commentaries on the collected texts, makes sense of the wide range of approaches, theories, and concepts that have informed Leisure Studies, and reviews the history of the subject and the rise of its identity and research agenda. It is an essential collection destined to be valued as a vital research resource by all scholars and students of the subject.