Fear: A Cultural History - Softcover

Bourke, Professor Joanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844081567 ISBN 13: 9781844081561

Publisher: Virago, 2006

Synopsis

Whether we like it or not, an atmosphere of fear pervades modern culture. In America, each day is color-coded for the level of threat; newspapers fill with gloomy news of climate crisis; and the radio and TV bleat with Amber alerts, car crashes, and the war wounded.

In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian Joanna Bourke helps us understand the landscape of fear we now navigate. Her review of the past two hundred years from diagnosed phobias to the media's role in creating new ones prompts strikingly original observations about the mind and worldview of the long twentieth century.” Blending sociocultural analysis with psychology, philosophy, and popular science, this beautifully written and exhaustively researched book offers an authoritative look at one of humankind's most basic emotions.

About this title

About the Author:

Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck College in London. Her book An Intimate History of Killing received critical acclaim, winning the Wolfson History Prize

From Publishers Weekly:

From death and disaster to dangerous technologies, the number of things out there to fear is countless, argues British historian Bourke (An Intimate History of Killing), who surveys a pitted landscape of dread and panic over the past two centuries in this imaginative social, psychological and cultural history. She traces how what we fear changes over time as a function of broader social anxieties and stresses. In the hierarchical Britain of the early 20th century, for instance, a lower-class accent was regarded with unparalleled horror; today, no one cares. The Victorians were terrified of sudden, natural death; today, at a time when people worry about "the excessive prolongation of life after all pleasure has been removed," being killed instantly and without warning is for many the preferred way to go. For us, the most feared thing of all is the terrorist, the "equivalent to the plague of earlier times or the Satan of religion." Though Bourke performs sterling service, painstakingly picking over usually bypassed sources and materials for hidden clues as to what scares us, she indulges the fashionable fallacy that because some fears—of terrorism, for example, since 9/11—have been exaggerated and even occasionally exploited, there is therefore nothing at all to fear but, presumably, fear itself. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1844081567
• ISBN 13: 9781844081561
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512