Description
Book SynopsisTwilight 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.
Table of ContentsList of Figures Introduction 1 Nostalgia 1.1 Origins of “Nostalgia” and What Came Before 1.2 Nostalgia for a Place: Local and Global 1.3 Nostalgia for a Time 1.4 Return: Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia 1.5 Belated Nostalgias 2 Writing History in Changing Times 3 The Historical Novel: Nostalgic Fictions in Times of Change 3.1 The Napoleonic Wars and Historical Fiction 3.2 History and Biography: Novels of the Recent Past 3.3 History and Fiction in Historical Fiction 3.4 Structures of Desire: The Nostalgic Historical Novel 4 Chapters 1 Sylvia’s Lovers and the Press Gang 1 The Art of Forgetfulness 2 Homesickness and the Press-Ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) 2.1 Napoleon, Nostalgia, and the Historical Novel 2.2 Readability and Forgetfulness 2.3 Leave-Taking 2 Thackeray’s Homesick Soldiers 1 Wavering Heroes and the Middle Way 2 Walter Scott and Intertextuality 3 Nostalgia as a ‘Swiss Disease’: Exiles and Homesick Soldiers 4 Autobiography 5 Battlefields in Historical Fiction 3 George Eliot’s Foregone Conclusions 4 Charles Dickens’s Iron Times 5 Strangers in Wessex 1 Belated Nostalgia and Regional Fiction: A Time and a Place 2 Hardy’s English Peasants 2.1 The Return of the Native: What Is Doing Well? 3 Itinerant Workers: Metaphors of Roots, Migrancy and Labour 3.1 The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Man Must Live Where His Money Is Made 4 Consuming Nostalgia: A Poeticised Pathology 4.1 Historical Fictions: Authentic and Inauthentic Pasts 5 Between History and Memory: The Dorsetshire Labourer and the Homesick Soldier Conclusion 1 Why Don’t We Take Nostalgia Seriously Anymore? 2 Subjectivity and ‘Good’ History 3 Politics and Ideology 4 Imagination and Environment Appendix 1: Images Appendix 2: Unpublished Mss Transcriptions Selected Bibliography Index
