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Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia

Author: Elisabeth Wesseling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1317068467

While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.

Was It Yesterday?

Author: Matthew Leggatt

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1438483503

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Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Westworld, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.

Screening Nostalgia

Author: Christine Sprengler

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1845458885

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"In this fascinating in-depth study of the impact of nostalgia on contemporary American cinema, Christine Sprengler unpicks the history of the concept and explores its significance in theory and practice. She offers a lucid analysis of the development of nostalgia in American society and culture, navigating a path through the key debates and aligning herself with recent attempts to recuperate its critical potential. This journey opens up the myriad permutations of nostalgia across visual and material culture and their interface with cinema, with the 1950s emerging as a privileged moment. Four case studies (Sin City, Far From Heaven, The Aviator and The Good German) analyse the ways in which aspects of visual design such as props, costume and colour contribute to the nostalgic aesthetic, allowing for both critical distance and emotion. Written with verve, style and impressive attention to detail, Screening Nostalgia is an invaluable addition to existing scholarship. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the ways in which we access the past through cinema." · Pam Cook, Professor Emerita in Film, University of Southampton

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Author: John J. Su

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-24

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1139448536

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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.

Nostalgia for the Modern

Author: Esra Özyürek

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-08-30

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780822338956

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An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.