Worrying

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History 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 quotidian kind of worry--the fearful, non-pathological, and hidden questioning about uncertain future. Francis O'Gorman offers both a cultural and a linguistic history of worry, culminating in 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.