Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. By Francis O’Gorman. Bloomsbury; 173 pages; $20 and £14.
WHEN he is not teaching Victorian literature at the University of Leeds or writing books, Francis O’Gorman admits to doing a lot of unnecessary brooding. “Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History” is his affectionate tribute to low-level fretting—what the author calls “the hidden histories of ordinary pain”—in everyone’s life.
The word itself is comparatively new. Although it was used in the 16th century, in all of Shakespeare’s works “worry” appears just once—as a transitive verb denoting strangling or choking. Only in the Victorian era did its contemporary meaning come into widespread use. The advent of literary modernism in the 20th century placed the personal inner world centre-stage. From James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom to Virginia Woolf’s Mr Ramsay, worriers came to abound in the modernist canon.
Humanity’s sense of anxiety has deep roots. Contemporary angst is inextricably tied up with living in an advanced, hyper-modern society, and yet, when worrying takes hold, it often does so in ways...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Dc9waf
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