{"product_id":"twilight-histories-nostalgia-and-the-victorian-historical-novel-9789004526501","title":"Twilight Histories: Nostalgia and the Victorian Historical Novel","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwilight 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eList 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","brand":"Brill","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53210856096087,"sku":"9789004526501","price":110.4,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/twilight-histories-nostalgia-and-the-victorian-historical-novel-9789004526501","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}