Introduction: Past “Perfect” and Present “Tense”: The Abuses and Uses of Modernist Nostalgia

Abstract

Far from being simply an idealized memory of lost homes, lost others, and lost histories, modernist nostalgia involves a tension between past and present that structures many of the most well known texts of the period. In the tension between a backward-looking and forward-looking impulse, modernist writers have discovered the potential for a productive dialogue where the past is brought into conversation with the present. Such a dialogue might nurture regressive fantasies of returning to the preindustrial or prelapsarian, but it also might lead to creative visions for self-fashioning, culture, and artistic practice. Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics demonstrates that a politics of nostalgia emerges in the contested struggle between the regressive abuses and creative uses of nostalgic longing. The thirteen essays and “Afterword” in this anthology speak directly to this contestation. They approach nostalgia as an interpretative stance, one that mediates the interplay between the individual and collective, continuity and rupture, memory and desire, escapist fantasy and social critique. The essays here show how modernist writers have responded to the upheavals of the period—war, modernization, and a number of geographic and social dislocations—from the unique mode of insight made available by nostalgia. What they assess is whether the modernist longing for the past fuels a reactionary agenda resistant to social change or promotes a progressive politics for the future. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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