Worrying

About this book

"Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History is a unique approach to the inner life and its ordinary pains. It charts the emergence of our contemporary conception of worry, which originated with the Victorians and became established after the First World War as a feature of modernity. It was, for some writers between the Wars, the 'disease of the age.'Worrying considers the kind of worry-fearful, non-pathological, and hidden questioning about uncertain futures-which is every day. It offers a 'short' history of worry as it came into language in the early twentieth century and a 'long' history: an account of worry as the natural bedfellow of a world in which we try to live by reason and believe we have the right to choose. It finds in the worrier a peculiar contemporary sufferer, whose world is not only exceptionally familiar but deeply strange. This book suggests that when we take worry into account, we realize just how little we know of others. 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 that it has become invisible in its familiarity, Worrying is a book about the sadness of everyday and how the modern world has shaped it"-- "A literary and cultural exploration of worry and the modern mind"--