Abstract
In “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Svetlana Boym offers a counter-intuitive interpretation of those stories where nostalgia is proven misguided: stories, specifically, that remind us that we can never “go home again.” “So much has been made of the happy homecoming,” she writes, “that it is time to do justice to [these] stories of non-return .… [The] inability to return home is both a personal tragedy and an enabling force” (16). The paradoxical truth that failure at pursuing nostalgia may be “enabling” in other respects is a crucial premise for understanding George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, a book whose treatment of nostalgia is widely misunderstood.
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Rae, P. (2013). “There’ll be no more fishing this side the grave”: Radical Nostalgia in George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air. In: Clewell, T. (eds) Modernism and Nostalgia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137326607_9
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