Boredom: A Lively HistoryIn the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom--what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers--spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific investigations, to illustrate its role in our lives. There are Australian aboriginals and bored Romans, Jeffrey Archer and caged cockatoos, Camus and the early Christians, Durer and Degas. Toohey also explores the important role that boredom plays in popular and highbrow culture and how over the centuries it has proven to be a stimulus for art and literature. Toohey shows that boredom is a universal emotion experienced by humans throughout history and he explains its place, and value, in today's world. "Boredom: A Lively History "is vital reading for anyone interested in what goes on when supposedly nothing happens. |
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Aboriginal acedia Albert Speer anger animals Antonio Damasio apotemnophilia BDNF become behaviour believe beneficence Beneventum Bore Track Boredom Proneness brain Cassian cause century chronic boredom chronically bored condition confinement Cranach the Elder David depression disgust dopamine dreary dromomania Emma ennui escape Evagrius existential boredom experience boredom feel find first form of boredom Francoise Frans de Waal Hedda hermit human incarceration individuals insula intellectual Jeffrey Archer leisure living absolutely London loneliness look Lucas Cranach melancholia melancholy modem monks Musharbash Nausea noonday demon normal nostalgia novel Oblomov Odysseus painting paranoia pathological tourism Patricia Meyer Spacks perhaps person philosopher posture predictable primary emotion prison prone to boredom psychological psychologist Reflections Robert Plutchik Roquentin rule breaking Sartre Sean Desmond seems sense simple boredom situations social emotions societies solitary Speer stimulation suffer suggests suicide term There's things tradition University Press Victoria Beckham viii Wemelsfelder yawning York
Bibliographic information
| Title | Boredom: A Lively History |
| Author | Peter Toohey |
| Publisher | Yale University Press, 2011 |
| ISBN | 0300172168, 9780300172164 |
| Length | 211 pages |
| Subjects | › FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS Psychology / General |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |