Novel word

Julian Gough, in a great essay on the modern novel, uses a cracking word I’ve not seen before.

He’s lamenting the way that university creative writing courses actually kill creativity by institutionalising it, and how graduates of these courses tend to focus their writing on the banality of their own academic lives. And he says this:

“Much of their fiction contains not so much tragedy as mere anxiety. Pushed to look for tragedy in lives that contain none, to generate suffering in order to be proper writers, they force themselves to frown rather than smile; and their work fills with a self-indulgent anxiety that could perhaps best be called ‘wangst.’”