Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History - Hardcover

O'Gorman, Francis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 144115129X ISBN 13: 9781441151292

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Synopsis

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner life and its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporary idea 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 “disease of the age.”

Worrying examines the everyday kind of worry-the fearful, non-pathological, and usually hidden questioning about uncertain futures. It shows worry to be a natural companion in a world where we try to live by reason and believe we have the right to choose, finding in the worrier a peculiarly contemporary sufferer whose mental life is 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.

About this title

About the Author

Francis O'Gorman, from English, Irish, and Hungarian families, was born in 1967 and educated as C.S. Deneke Organ Scholar of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he took a double first and a doctorate in English literature. He is the author or editor of 23 books,mostly on English literature, and of essays on literature, music, and the condition of the modern English university. His Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury, 2015), described by John Carey as “subtle, exploratory, completely original,” was a Guardian “Book of the Week,” a Sunday Times “Must Read,” and one of Bookbag's “History Books of the Year, 2015.” For a decade, Francis O'Gorman held a chair in the School of English at the University of Leeds; he is now Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. When not working, he likes playing the organ, walking Arthur's Seat, or sitting in a bar.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 144115129X
• ISBN 13: 9781441151292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192