We are the safest humans who ever lived - the statistics prove it. And yet the media tells a different story with its warnings and scare stories. How is it possible that anxiety has become the stuff of daily life?In this ground-breaking, compulsively readable book, Dan Gardner s…
An examination of state-building, class conflicts, revolutions and fear of revolutions from the English Civil War of the 1640s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Great Recession from 2003. Sheds new light on key topics and events, and offers a fully substantiated argument …
"In 1842 Henrich Heine, the German poet, wrote that the bourgeoisie, 'obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster' and 'an instinctive dread of communism', were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a 'politics motivated by …
"This book offers a diachronical and inter-/transmedia approach to the relationship of media and fear the media's role in pandemics, wars and other crises, as well as in political intimidation. It points out the historically and transculturally strong nexus between media and fea…
"Baroque Horrors turns the current cultural and political conversation from the familiar narrative patterns and self-justifying allegories of abjection to a dialogue on the history of our modern fears and their monstrous offspring. When life and death are severed from nature and…
Introduction: a taste for the macabre in the age of curiosities -- Miscellanea: the garden of curiosities and macabre theater -- Sins of our fathers (and spouses): the preternatural in baroque exemplary tales -- Zayas' bodyworks: protogothic moral pornography or a baroque trap f…
Baroque Horrors turns the current cultural and political conversation from the familiar narrative patterns and self-justifying allegories of abjection to a dialogue on the history of our modern fears and their monstrous offspring. When life and death are severed from nature and …