Twilight Histories: Nostalgia and the Victorian Historical Novel

Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-52650-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 231, 242 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

Reihe: Costerus New Series

Twilight Histories explores the relationship between nostalgia and the Victorian historical novel, arguing that both responded to the turbulence brought by accelerating modernisation. Nostalgia began as a pathological homesickness, its first victims seventeenth-century soldiers serving abroad. Only gradually did it become the sentimental memory we understand it as today. In a striking parallel to nostalgia’s origin, the historical novel emerged in the tumultuous early-years of the nineteenth century, at a time when the Napoleonic Wars once again set troops on the move, creating a new wave of homesick soldiers. In the historical novels of Gaskell, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy, nostalgia offered a language in which to describe the experience of living through changing times as a homesickness for history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cassidy, Camilla

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Über Autor(innen)

Camilla Cassidy holds a DPhil in nineteenth-century literature from the University of Oxford and teaches Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Faculty of Sustainability at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.