The essays brought together in this book understand phobia not as a pathology, but as a versatile moral, political, and aesthetic resource - and one with a history. They demonstrate that enquiry into strong feelings of aversion has enabled writers and film-makers to say and show things they could not otherwise have said or shown; and in this way to get profoundly and provocatively to grips with the modern condition.

The essays are arranged in such a way as to chart phobia's unfolding as a resource in literature and film since 1850. They pose the question 'What does phobia know?' in relation to a range of writers and film-makers: from Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot through Hardy, Zola, Joyce, Ford, Mansfield, and Woolf to Tony Harrison and Buchi Emecheta; from Jean Renoir through Hitchcock, Wyler, Kurosawa, and Truffaut to Margarethe von Trotta, Pedro Almodóvar, and Lynne Ramsay. They take issue in particular with the pre-eminent status the concept of trauma has recently acquired in cultural theory and cultural history. In so doing contribute to and re-shape the current preoccupation with ordinariness.

David Trotter is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He was co-founder of the Cambridge Screen Media Group, and has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature.