Description

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural Historysuggests a unique approach to the inner lifeand its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gormancharts the emergence of our contemporaryidea of worry in the Victorian era and itsestablishment, after the First World War, as a feature of modernity. For some writersbetween the Wars, worry was the "diseaseof the age."

Worryingexamines the everyday kind ofworry-the fearful, non-pathological, andusually hidden questioning about uncertainfutures. It shows worry to be a naturalcompanion in a world where we try to liveby reason and believe we have the right tochoose, finding in the worrier a peculiarlycontemporary sufferer whose mental lifeis not only exceptionally familiar, but alsodeeply 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, Worryingexplores how the modern world has shaped our everyday anxieties.