Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History
ISBN-10
144115129X
ISBN-13
9781441151292
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
193
Language
English
Published
2015-05-21
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Author
Francis O'Gorman

Description

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner lifeand its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporaryidea of worry in the Victorian era and its establishment, after the First World War,as a feature of modernity. For some writers between the Wars, worry was the "diseaseof the age." Worrying examines the everyday kind of worry-the fearful, non-pathological, andusually hidden questioning about uncertain futures. It shows worry to be a naturalcompanion in a world where we try to live by reason and believe we have the right tochoose, finding in the worrier a peculiarly contemporary sufferer whose mental lifeis not only exceptionally familiar, but also deeply strange. Offering an intimately personal account of an all-too-common human experience, and of a word that slips in and out of ordinary conversation so often that it has become invisible in its familiarity,Worrying explores how the modern world has shaped our everyday anxieties.

Other editions

Similar books