1st Edition
Crisis and the Culture of Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Europe
The accruement of crises over the last two decades, with their particular manifestations in the European context, has evoked the feeling of living in exceptional times, as captured in the recurrent claim that we live in the "age of anxiety." The main aim of this collection is to analyse, from a multidisciplinary perspective, the causes and consequences of the current dominance of the discourse of fear, anxiety, and crisis through the experience of distinct and often interdependent moral panics in twenty-first-century Europe.
With its multidisciplinary approach, this volume sheds light on the need to view the interrelationship between different crises and their associated affects as crucial in attaining a more nuanced understanding of the aetiology and effects of the current "age of anxiety." This multidisciplinary scrutiny of the interrelationship of twenty-first-century fears, anxiety and crises signals an original engagement with these complex phenomena in order to make their emergence and profound effects on contemporary society more comprehensible.
The timeliness of the thematic focus and the rigorous in-depth analyses make this collection relevant to students and academics within the fields of sociology, literary and cultural studies, political science and anthropology, as well as to those in European studies and global studies.
1. Introduction: Fear, anxiety, and crisis. Europe and emotions in the twenty-first century
Carmen Zamorano Llena, Jonas Stier, and Billy Gray
2. The pedagogy of listening: the poetics of crisis in contemporary Europe
Nicholas Manganas
3.Nordic (in)securities, transatlantic anxieties, and global crises: the inhospitable "homeland" in Northern European films
Susana Araújo
4. Virtual terrorists, virtual anxiety: affect and technology in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
Gen’ichiro Itakura
5. Anxiety in financial crisis cinema: gendered alternatives to patriarchal neoliberalism in Costa-Gavras’s Le capital (2012)
Elena Oliete-Aldea
6. Border anxieties in Brexit literature: Anthony J. Quinn and the politics of crime fiction
Mandy Beck
7. Securitisation of the Swedish migration policy and the situation for unaccompanied children
Mehrdad Darvishpour, Joakim Johansson, and Niclas Månsson
8. The witness of others: refugees, hope, and Europe
Gerard McCann
9. Eco-anxiety as a dimension of European anxious experiences
Panu Pihkala
10. The anxieties of intergenerational environmental justice in John Lanchester’s The Wall
David Gray
11. In defence of fear: COVID-19, crises, and democracy
Dan Degerman, Matthew Flinders, and Matthew Thomas Johnson
12. Ageism, anxiety, and the crisis of capitalist subjectivity
Karen West
13. Framing the "exceptions to the rule" in analyses of responses to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: a study of European poles involving Sweden and Bulgaria
Vessela Misheva, Antoaneta Hristova, Fredrik Palm, Ilina Nacheva, Maria Hopstadius, Andrew Blasko
14. Conclusion: the future of (meta)crisis: from anxiety and the culture of fear to hope, solidarity, and the culture of resilience?
Carmen Zamorano Llena, Jonas Stier, and Billy Gray
Biography
Carmen Zamorano Llena is Professor of English at Dalarna University, Sweden. She is the author of Fictions of Migrations in Contemporary Britain and Ireland (2020) and co-editor of the Cultural Identity Studies series, as well as of several collections of essays, including Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (2013) and Authority and Wisdom in the New Ireland: Studies in Literature and Culture (2015).
Jonas Stier is Professor of Social Work at Mälardalen University, Sweden. He is co-editor of the Cultural Identity Studies series and an editorial board member of the Journal of Intercultural Communication. Stier has authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books, including Cultural Encounters: An Introduction to Intercultural Studies ([Kulturmöten: en introduktion till interkulturella studier] 2019) and Society and I: A Sociological Approach ([Samhället och jag: en sociologisk ingång] 2021).
Billy Gray is Associate Professor of English at Dalarna University, Sweden. He is the author of Representations of Sufism in Contemporary Fiction in English (2023, forthcoming) and co-editor of the Cultural Identity Studies series and of the collection of essays Authority and Wisdom in the New Ireland: Studies in Literature and Culture (2015).
