Crisis and the Culture of Fear and Anxiety in Contemporary Europe

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).

1. Introduction: Fear, anxiety, and crisis. Europe in the twenty-first century

2. The pedagogy of listening: The poetics of crisis in contemporary Europe

3.Nordic (in)securities, transatlantic anxieties, and global crises. The inhospitable "homeland" in Northern European films

4. Virtual terrorists, virtual anxiety: Affect and technology in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

5. Anxiety in financial crisis cinema: Gendered alternatives to patriarchal neoliberalism in Costa-Gavras’s Le capital (2012)

6. Border anxieties in Brexit literature: Anthony J. Quinn and the politics of crime fiction

7. Securitisation of the Swedish migration policy and the situation for unaccompanied children

8. The witness of others: Refugees, hope, and Europe

9. Eco-anxiety as a dimension of European anxious experiences

10. The anxieties of intergenerational environmental justice in John Lanchester’s The Wall

11. In defence of fear: COVID-19, crises, and democracy

12. Ageism, anxiety, and the crisis of capitalist subjectivity

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

14. Conclusion: The future of (meta)crisis: From anxiety and the culture of fear to hope, solidarity, and the culture of resilience?