| Anxious Times Subjects: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Composition & Creative Writing.; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Literacy.; Education Higher; Labor unions; Americanization; Acculturation; Immigrants; Citizenship; Literacy; Much like the Information Age of the twenty-first century, the Industrial Age was a period of great social changes brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization, speed of travel, and global communications. The literature, medicine, science, and popular journalism of the nineteenth century attempted to diagnose problems of the mind and body that such drastic transformations were thought to generate: a range of conditions or "diseases of modernity" resulting from specific changes in the social and physical environment. The alarmist rhetoric of newspapers and popular periodicals, advertising various "neurotic remedies," in turn inspired a new class of physicians and quack medical practices devoted to the treatment and perpetuation of such conditions. Amelia Bonea is a research fellow at the Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. Melissa Dickson is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of Birmingham. Sally Shuttleworth is professor of English literature at the University of Oxford. Jennifer Wallis is a teaching fellow in medical humanities at Imperial College London. |