Anna Katharina Schaffner

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. 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. Exhaustion finds in our struggle to overcome weariness a more significant effort to master ourselves.

A History

Exhaustion

A brilliant distillation of the key ideas behind successful self-improvement practices throughout history, showing us how they remain relevant today Self-help today is a multi-billion-dollar global industry, one often seen as a by-product of neoliberalism and capitalism. Far from being a recent phenomenon, however, the practice of self-improvement has a long and rich history, extending all the way back to ancient China. For millennia, philosophers, sages, and theologians have reflected on the good life and devised strategies on how to achieve it. Focusing on ten core ideas of self-improvement that run through the world's advice literature, Anna Katharina Schaffner reveals the ways they have evolved across cultures and historical eras, and why they continue to resonate with us today. Reminding us that there is much to learn from looking at time-honed models, Schaffner also examines the ways that self-improvement practices provide powerful barometers of the values, anxieties, and aspirations that preoccupy us at particular moments in time and expose basic assumptions about our purpose and nature.

Ten Timeless Truths

The Art of Self-Improvement

Shane Weller

This volume explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in the work of a range of major European modernists as well as in that of some less-well-known figures of the period such as Dujardin and Jahnn.

European Literature After Sexology

Modernist Eroticisms

Greta Wagner

Sighard Neckel

This interdisciplinary book explores the connections and tensions between sociological, psychological, and biological theories of exhaustion. It examines how the prevalence of exhaustion – both as an individual experience and as a broader socio-cultural phenomenon – is manifest in the epidemic rise of burnout, depression, and chronic fatigue. It provides innovative analyses of the complex interplay between the processes involved in the production of mental health diagnoses, socio-cultural transformations, and subjective illness experiences. Using many of the existing ideologically charged exhaustion theories as case studies, the authors investigate how individual discomfort and wider social dynamics are interrelated. Covering a vast breadth of topics, this book will appeal to scholars of psychology, sociology, medicine, psychiatry, literature, and history.

Anna Katharina Schaffner

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