Explore the vast range of titles available.

A deeply personal narrative about all the ways in which we cower and crush through stories.

In this classic and deeply insightful book, one of the worlds most eminent philosophers describes the dilemma of modern man and points a way to the conquest of the problem of anxiety. This edition includes a new introduction by Peter J. Gomes that reflects on the impact of this book in the years since it was written.Were I to choose the most significant book in religion published in the second half of the twentieth century, my choice would fall easily upon Paul Tillichs The Courage to Be.Peter J. GomesThe brilliance, the wealth of illustration, and the aptness of personal application . . . make the reading of these chapters an exciting experience.W. Norman Pittenger, New York Times Book ReviewA lucid and arresting book.Frances Witherspoon, New York Herald TribuneClear, uncluttered thinking and lucid writing mark Mr. Tillichs study as a distinguished and readable one.American Scholar

Drawing on an impressive range of secondary material, including many elusive reviews, interviews and articles from the under-explored Highsmith Archive, Fiona Peters suggests that the usual generic distinctions -crime fiction, mystery, suspense - have been largely unhelpful in elucidating Patricia Highsmith's novels. Peters analyzes a significant selection of Highsmith's works, chosen with a view towards demonstrating the range of her oeuvre while also identifying the main themes and preoccupations running throughout her career. Adopting a psychoanalytic approach, Peters proposes a reading of Highsmith that subordinates murder as the primary focus of the novels in favor of the gaps between periods of activity represented through anxiety, waiting, lack of desire and evil. Her close readings of the Ripley series, This Sweet Sickness, Deep Water, The Tremor of Forgery, and The Cry of the Owl, among others, reveal and illuminate Highsmith's concern with minutiae and the particular. Peters makes a strong case that the specific disturbances within her texts have resulted in Highsmith's writing remaining resistant to explication and to the more sophisticated interpretative strategies that would seek to position her within a specific genre.

Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative by Ruth Mackay traces the figures of flight, grievous falls, and collapsing towers, all of which haunt American narratives before and after 9/11. Mackay examines how these events prefigure 9/11, exploring the narrative residue left by the \"end\" of horizontal space-when settlers reached America's Pacific Coast, leaving nowhere westward on the continent to go. She then continues into the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. This period of time marks an era of verticality: an age that offers a transformed concept of the limits of space, entwined with a sense of anxiety and trepidation. With this study, Mackay asks: In what oblique ways has verticality leaked into American narrative? Why do metaphors of up and down recur across the twentieth century? With close readings of Jonathan Safran Foer'sExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Winsor McCay's comic stripLittle Nemo in Slumberland, Upton Sinclair'sOil! and its film rendering There Will Be Blood, Allen Ginsberg's poetic dissections of the nuclear bomb, and Leslie Marmon Silko's imagining of flight inAlmanac of the Dead, this interdisciplinary study culminates with a discussion of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.Waiting for the Sky to Fall examines how vertical representation cleaves to, and often transforms the associations of, specific events that are physically and visually disorienting, disquieting, or even traumatic.

InPrecarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment. The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and night—and to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past? Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience, Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the \"digital now.\" Expanding the modern discourse on time and speed, Fuchs deploys such concepts as attention, slowness and lateness to emphasize the uneven quality of time around the world.

Aesthetic Anxiety analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity.

From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety , Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxieties in the selected narratives of four women writing in French – Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Hébert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women's works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general post-Second World War scepticism about the power of language to express non-linguistic phenomena such as the destruction and loss of life that a large portion of Europe endured during that period. Willging maintains that while these women writers are profoundly wary of language and its artificiality, they eschew the radical linguistic scepticism of many post-war male writers and theorists. Rather, she argues, the anxiety that these four writers express stems less from a loss of faith in language's referential function than from a culturally ingrained doubt about their own ability as women to make language reflect certain realities. Ultimately, Telling Anxiety shows the crippling obstacles of literary agency for women in the twentieth century from the perspective of those who fully understood the significant responsibility of their work.

Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She suggests that while colonial writers use narratives of intrigue to endorse imperial rule, postcolonial writers turn the generic conventions and topography of the fiction of intrigue on its head, launching a critique of imperial power that makes the repressive and emancipatory impulses of postcolonial modernity visible. Siddiqi devotes the first part of her book to the colonial fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in which the British regime's preoccupation with maintaining power found its voice. The rationalization of difference, pronouncedly expressed through the genre's strategies of representation and narrative resolution, helped to reinforce domination and, in some cases, allay fears concerning the loss of colonial power. In the second part, Siddiqi argues that late twentieth-century South Asian writers also underscore the state's insecurities, but unlike British imperial writers, they take a critical view of the state's authoritarian tendencies. Such writers as Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie use the conventions of detective and spy fiction in creative ways to explore the coercive actions of the postcolonial state and the power dynamics of a postcolonial New Empire. Drawing on the work of leading theorists of imperialism such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and the Subaltern Studies historians, Siddiqi reveals how British writers express the anxious workings of a will to maintain imperial power in their writing. She also illuminates the ways South Asian writers portray the paradoxes of postcolonial modernity and trace the ruses and uses of reason in a world where the modern marks a horizon not only of hope but also of economic, military, and ecological disaster.