Afterword: Nostalgia and Modernist Anxiety

Abstract

Like modernism, nostalgia turns out to be constituted by its very tensions. As the essays in this volume suggest, nostalgia in the early twentieth century was rarely simple or simply one thing, but a rich and varied phenomenon: potentially redemptive and narrow, progressive and conservative, barren, fruitful, dangerous, and liberating. Nostalgic desire had many objects, sometimes for places, both real and imaginary, as the essays in the “Locations” section consider; sometimes for a rural past, as Robert Hemmings observes in Sassoon’s use of an idyllic period before the war, and sometimes for a particular urban past, explored by Barry J. Faulk in his essay on music halls. And nostalgia could have more surprising targets, such as for the older metrical forms discussed in Meredith Martin’s essay, or even, as Gabrielle McIntire and Marina MacKay argue, the hunger for nostalgia and for modernism itself. And of course, nostalgic longing could be a blend of these and many other desires. Even the form of nostalgia varies, alternatively functioning as a conscious memory, a repressed desire, an unfulfillable longing, an emotion, or some combination. What is clear, though, is that after this collection and other recent work on modernist nostalgia, any idea that British, Irish, and American modernists—and modernist critics—only treat nostalgia with disdain must be discarded.¹