This two-volume handbook, written by leading international scholars, provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on the collection, analysis, and application of time use data.

Time is a crucial yet finite social resource, fundamental to processes of growth, equality, and well-being. Much of the world's essential production-raising children, preparing food, household maintenance-occurs within households, and relies on time, rather than monetary exchange, as its central input. Despite its centrality, this non-market dimension is often overlooked in official indicators. Time use diary data is increasingly recognised as the foremost source of reliable information on these key temporal dimensions of daily life.

The second volume provides an authoritative outline of the contribution of time use research to key contemporary scholarly and policy applications in both the Global North and the Global South. The chapters consist of a wide-ranging selection of exemplary contributions chosen to illustrate the varied areas of substantive empirical research for which time use diary data has been used in research across the globe, including gender and life-course studies, research on employment and the labour force, care-giving, and contributions to the measurement of both population well-being and sustainable development goals.

With a focus on the application and future directions of time use research, it will be a valuable point of reference for students and scholars from fields including sociology, demography, social policy, economics, gender studies, psychology, leisure and tourism studies, public health, and legal studies. The first volume of the handbook addresses methodological issues concerning the collection and analysis of data and is available at www.routledge.com/9781041123934.

Between 1700 and 1800, the English-speaking world came to terms with one of modernity's most fundamental ideas: the separation of time from its measure, or what Newton described as the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" time. Jesse Molesworth argues that most experienced this encounter not firsthand, through direct exposure to Newton's writings, but secondhand, through a variety of smaller encounters in art, science, culture, and literature.

Enriching our understanding of the connection between science and literature, Forms of Time, Newton to Austen offers the rise of the novel as a case study to examine the relationship between transformations in culture and transformations in literary forms. Through incisive readings of works by Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and others, Molesworth reveals that the novel arose by making visible what culture does not or cannot see itself. The emergent "realist" novel did not adopt Newtonian claims wholesale. While the novel accommodated the new physicalist sense of "absolute time" in theme, its formal techniques offered something else: an escape, however temporary, from the claims made by Newtonian time.

Explores the relationship between fantastical literature and scientific inquiryWhat did early modern Chinese readers believe about dragons, thunder, or fate, and where did they learn it? Observing the Unseen explores how literate and marginally literate people in China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries investigated the invisible, the ubiquitous, and the inexplicable. Whether through medical encyclopedias, daily-use almanacs, or novels and anecdotes, readers pursued knowledge of the natural world with curiosity shaped as much by wonder as by empiricism.

Andrew Schonebaum reveals that for many readers, stories were an important source of reliable information about the world. Knowledge of the natural world evolved in the margins of "fiction." Entertainment literature and practical texts alike conveyed information that was collected, debated, and even used to treat illness or predict the future. Drawing from overlooked genres such as brush notes, court records, and sequels to popular stories, Schonebaum demonstrates that common knowledge was constructed through a patchwork of sources-elite and vernacular, empirical and fantastical.

Rather than privileging science as courtly or Western, Observing the Unseen shows how ordinary readers made sense of the cosmos in an age of expanding literacy and print culture. It challenges assumptions about what Chinese literature was and how it was read, offering a nuanced picture of everyday life in early modern China. This is a work for scholars of Chinese history and literature, historians of science, and anyone interested in the complicated ways humans seek to understand the unseen.