Introduction

Abstract

At a time when the twentieth century approaches closure and the past presses against the borders of the present (when one can, for instance, purchase a cardboard facsimile of a nineteenth-century proscenium to frame the cyberspace of one’s computer screen), and at a time when the troubling question of the relation between the past and the present lays siege to a culture’s conscience, it is, perhaps, appropriate to consider the role of nostalgia as an organizing force in the imagination and memory. Increasingly one senses a preoccupation with remembrance. One notices a recurrence of the word ‘nostalgia’ in popular and critical discourses and comes across studies like David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) and Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (1994) that document the proliferation of nostalgia in contemporary culture.

Nostalgia may be mistaken for melancholia, by the restlessness and want of sleep which accompanies the disease, and the strong tendency to selfdestruction [sic] which attends it when the desire of revisiting the country which is longed after, cannot be accomplished; life becomes then a burden, and the taedium vitae leads to real insanity, terminating in suicide. From what has been said, the necessity for distinguishing nostalgia from insanity, when the distinction may prove serviceable, must be sufficiently obvious.

A. T. Thomson, ‘Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence at the University of London’, The Lancet, I (18 March 1837) 883