Longing for Wonderland: Nostalgia for Nature in Post-Frontier America

Abstract

Nostalgia has long held the dubious distinction of being one of contemporary theory's most pigeonholed concepts.As David Lowenthal explains, nostalgia stands accused of being "ersatz, vulgar, demeaning, misguided, inauthentic, sacrilegious, retrograde, reactionary, criminal, fraudulent, sinister, and morbid" (27).In some cases, it is guilty as charged.Nostalgia's scapegoat status stems from a range of admittedly problematic traits: its easy cooptation by capitalism, which critics like Fredric Jameson say generates a postmodern cultural paralysis in which old styles are recycled and marketed without critical effect; its ubiquity in the media and the arts, which signifies a lack of creativity, an alienation from the present and a com plicity in consumer culture; its tendency to romanticize the past through imagining an origin that is too simplistic; and its reactionary bent-the use of nostalgia by right-wing forces to gloss over past wrongs and glorify tradition as justification for the present.Due to its problematic associations, the term "nostalgic" is often used interchangeably with words like conservative, regressive, ahistorical, or uncritical to disparage or dismiss writers, politicians, scholarship, and cultural texts.Yet as both an emotion and a political narrative-a narrative Linda Hutcheon deems ca pable of "the unexpected twin evocation of both affect and agency" (199)-nostal gia exceeds such limitations.It is high time to breathe new life into nostalgia, to revitalize and rearticulate its diverse narrative possibilities, and to redeploy it in the service of more progressive politics.Jennifer Ladino is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Washington.Her disser tation is a genealogy of nostalgia for nature in twentieth-century American literature and culture.She has also spent nine summers working as a park ranger in Grand Teton National Park.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.