Description Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified.
Her most recent book is Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930 (2012)..
She has published on the histories of sexuality and psychoanalysis, modernist literature, and the avant-garde.
About the Author Anna Katharina Schaffner is reader in comparative literature and medical humanities at the University of Kent.
Mapping these political, ideological, and creative currents across centuries of human development, Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.
Pathologized, demonized, sexualized, and even weaponized, exhaustion unites the mind with the body and society in such a way that we attach larger questions of agency, willpower, and well-being to its symptoms.
It has been linked to loss, the alignment of the planets, a perverse desire for death, and social and economic disruption.
Medical, cultural, literary, and biographical sources have cast exhaustion as a biochemical imbalance, a somatic ailment, a viral disease, and a spiritual failing.
Beginning in classical antiquity, this book demonstrates how exhaustion has always been with us and helps us evaluate more critically the narratives we tell ourselves about the phenomenon.
We look to the past, imagining life to have once been simpler and slower, but extreme mental and physical stress is not a modern syndrome.
Many people complain of burnout, and economic instability and the threat of ecological catastrophe fill us with dread.
Proliferating technologies command our attention.
Description Today our fatigue feels chronic; our anxieties, amplified
