Modernism and Nostalgia

Modernism and Nostalgia

Author: T. Clewell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-07-29

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1137326603

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This book addresses the multiple meanings of nostalgia in the literature of the period. Whether depicted as an emotion, remembrance, or fixation, these essays demonstrate that the nostalgic impulse reveals how deeply rooted in the damaged, the old, and the vanishing, were the variety of efforts to imagine and produce the new—the distinctly modern.


The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia

The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia

Author: Tobias Becker

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-21

Total Pages: 802

ISBN-13: 1040106919

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The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly. Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements, and gaps in existing literature. Comprising 45 chapters, the volume covers the following topics: Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology. Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory. Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia. Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects. Media-related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels. Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history, and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum, and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.


Quest West

Quest West

Author: Richard Lehan

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2014-05-05

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0807153931

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Few spaces remain as central to American consciousness as the western frontier. The vast territory, which for generations fueled the desires and conquests of artists, philosophers, and politicians alike, now offers new discoveries in Richard Lehan's Quest West. Through an intellectual and cultural history of the frontier experience, Lehan details the transformations of ideas and literary forms that occurred as the country expanded to the west and demonstrates how the wilderness, and then by turn the urban frontier, represent an ideological summary of the nation itself. His study involves the foundations of belief and the realms of evolving interpretations, from mythic destiny to the more regional address of historicism. In both instances, the desire is to find meaning in the lost past. By tracing the evolution of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis -- that the unchartered frontier ended in 1890 and was replaced with an equally precarious urban landscape -- Lehan argues that the two spaces became the basis for a division still evident in America today. Historically, the wilderness accommodated conservative thinking, while urban environments proved more conducive to liberal values. Ideologies stemming from the two regions, as Lehan shows, found literary equivalents in fictional narratives ranging from subgenres like the Western and naturalism to modern forms like neorealism and noir, extending even into the postmodern. Lehan offers a view of the West as a cultural phenomenon borne of ideological changes, encompassing historical and literary movements -- from Puritan perspectives to the revisionist claims of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, from homesteading to imperial ambition. Quest West traces these competing ideas as they appear in the works of major American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Nathanael West, and John Steinbeck. An important work of literary and historical scholarship, Quest West presents compelling evidence that the meaning of America remains inseparable from the march of seminal ideas westward.


Phonographic Memories

Phonographic Memories

Author: Njelle W. Hamilton

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2019-05-03

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0813596599

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Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide poetics that attends to the centrality of Caribbean music in retrieving and replaying personal and cultural memories, Hamilton offers a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization.


The Culture of Cursilería

The Culture of Cursilería

Author: Noël Valis

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-01-16

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0822384280

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Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilería refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería, Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture. Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity. The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.


Writing the Pioneer Woman

Writing the Pioneer Woman

Author: Janet Floyd

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0826262651

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Focusing on a series of autobiographical texts, published and private, well known and obscure, Writing the Pioneer Woman examines the writing of domestic life on the nineteenth-century North American frontier. In an attempt to determine the meanings found in the pioneer woman's everyday writings -- from records of recipes to descriptions of washing floors -- Janet Floyd explores domestic details in the autobiographical writing of British and Anglo-American female emigrants.


Scurvy

Scurvy

Author: Jonathan Lamb

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1400884543

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An intellectual history of scurvy in the eighteenth century Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. In this book, Jonathan Lamb presents an intellectual history of scurvy unlike any other, probing the speechless encounter with powerful sensations to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting. Drawing on historical accounts from scientists and voyagers as well as major literary works, Lamb traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. He explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. He vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of "scorbutic nostalgia," in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. Lamb argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift. Masterful and illuminating, Scurvy shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.


Read On...Biography

Read On...Biography

Author: Rick Roche

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-03-07

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13:

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Categorizing hundreds of popular biographies according to their primary appeal—character, story, setting, language, and mood—and organizing them into thematic lists, this guide will help readers' advisors more effectively recommend titles. Read On...Biography: Reading Lists for Every Taste is that essential go-to readers' advisory guide, filling a gap in the growing readers' advisory literature with information about 450 biography titles, most published within the last decade, but also including some classic titles as well. The book focuses on life stories written in the third person, with subjects ranging from individuals who lived in ancient times to the present-day, hailed from myriad nations, and gained fame in diverse fields. The contents are organized in order to facilitate identification of read-alikes and easy selection of titles according to appeal features such as character, story, language, setting, and mood. Written specifically with librarians and their patrons in mind, this readers' advisory title will be invaluable in public, high school, and college libraries.


Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism

Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism

Author: Jean Pickering

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0814766366

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Most Americans think of Betsy Ross as she was depicted in Charles Weisberger's popular painting The Birth of Our Nation's Flag--a motherly figure, sewing at the hearth. In fact, as Jo Ann Menezes's analysis in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism points out, Ross was a widowed businesswoman who ran an upholstery shop out of her house. In Weisberger's painting, all signs of economic industry are erased and Ross's house is transformed into a home rather that the site of cottage industry. Ross is constructed as the perfect heroic mother, worthy of sacred creation; thus, our flag was born. Ross's transformation into an icon neatly illustrates the conjunction of soaring nationalism and the establishment of woman as a fixed domestic presence and serves as an excellent example of the master narratives revealed in Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism. The essays in this provocative anthology explore the connections between nation and gender and the ways in which nostalgia functions to bind these two presumably unrelated constructions together. Collectively they suggest that women pay a special fee on behalf of the nation, even though it is traditionally represented as an honorarium given to them and that, in fact, the nation-state takes as a foundational principle the subordination of women.