This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists (Darwin, Stevenson, Gaskell, Ruskin, Pater, Brown and Turner) whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. The study concentrates on the longing for a past that traverses the span of these writers' and artists' own lifetime. It examines their particular experience of the nostalgic moment and provides an occasion to re-examine the idea of nostalgia and to reflect on the act of recollection.
This book is about a group of Victorian British writers and artists (Darwin, Stevenson, Gaskell, Ruskin, Pater, Brown and Turner) whose work emerges from recollection and whose texts embody the experience of nostalgia. The study concentrates on the longing for a past that traverses the span of these writers' and artists' own lifetime. It examines their particular experience of the nostalgic moment and provides an occasion to re-examine the idea of nostalgia and to reflect on the act of recollection.
Referred to long ago as a "disease" of Swiss soldiers and Highland regiments far from home, nostalgia became known in the 1920s as more of a fleeting rather than debilitating condition. Yet what caused this shift in our collective understanding of the term? In Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917, Linda M. Austin traces the development of nostalgia from a memory disorder in the eighteenth century to its modern formulation as a pleasant recreational distraction. Offering a paradigm for and analysis of nostalgic memory as it operates in various attempts to reenact the past, Austin explains both the early and the modern understanding of this phenomenon. Beginning with an account of nostalgia's transformation from an acute form of melancholia and homesickness into elegiac expression and idyllic representation, Austin goes on to examine an array of texts, from poetic meditations on nostalgia in the first half of the nineteenth century to the popular adult souvenirs of childhood in the second half. She shows how, in novels by Hardy; in elegies and lyrics by Arnold, Tennyson, and Emily Brontë; in illustrations by Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham; and in late Victorian cultural histories of the cottage, nostalgia acts as a collective, rather than an individual reenactment of an invented, rather than a remembered, past or place. For students and scholars interested in the Victorian era, as well as in Romanticism and modernism, Nostalgia in Transition provides a well-rounded perspective on how and why our understanding of nostalgia has changed over time.
With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering. Dames argues that the notable scarcity and distinct unease of representations of remembrance in the nineteenth-century British novel signal an art form struggling to define and construct new concepts of memory. By placing nineteenth-century British fiction from Jane Austen to Wilkie Collins alongside a wide variety of Victorian psychologies and theories of mind, Nicholas Dames evokes a novelistic world, and a culture, before modern memory--one dedicated to a nostalgic evasion of detailed recollection which our time has largely forgotten.
By revealing the origins of common misunderstandings about nostalgia, this book aims, moreover, to show that it creatively fosters a personal and imaginative memory."--Jacket.
Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.
This collection analyzes philosophical, psycho-analytic and aesthetic contexts of the discourse of melancholia in British and postcolonial literature and culture and seeks to trace the multi-faceted phenomenon of melancholia from the early modern period to the present. Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.
This book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic.
This study explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. It discusses major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - and also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers.
