This dissertation interrogates the nostalgic story, which has been a favorite in the Western literary tradition since Homer's paradigmatic tale of nostalgia, the Odyssey. Interpreting nostalgia etymologically to mean the longing to return home, this dissertation suggests that the traditional story of nostalgia may be alienating to woman who has historically remained, physically as well as psychically, in the home, and it argues that certain contemporary women writers are critiquing and rewriting the nostalgic story. Chapter One, "The Subject of Desire in Feminist Theory," situates this dissertation within the context of current issues in feminist theory, namely, the problem of defining woman. Chapter Two, "There's No place like Home: Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of Nostalgia," traces the pattern of Oedipal desire in popular narratives of nostalgia, The Wizard of Oz, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, in order to show how alienating such narratives may be to a woman. Chapter Three, "Nostalgia and Marilynne Robinson's Discontent," discusses Marilynne Robinson's revision of the nostalgic story in her novel Housekeeping, and Chapter Four, "Longing to Long: Kathy Acker and the Politics of Pain," discusses Kathy Acker's representation of the pain that is caused by woman's alienation from the traditional nostalgic story.

Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day presents an interdisciplinary approach to an important aspect of Gothic texts, films, and music: that of rewriting. From the eighteenth-century Gothic novel to present-day vampire films and Goth music, the genre is characterised by its nostalgic reflection on past worlds, narratives, and identities. Gothic nostalgia is often accompanied by a transgressive drive, resulting in perversions of the rewritten past—the modern vampire is no longer embodied evil but an attractive dandy, while Goth subcultures reflect on Victorian aesthetics but pervert them by adding fetishist elements. Gothic nostalgia transforms the past, turning it upside down, foregrounding its background, and corrupting its order. In this volume an international group of philosophy, literature, film, and music scholars investigates the instrumental role of nostalgia and perversion in the Gothic’s rewriting of the past. If elements of both nostalgia and perversion are operative in Gothic rewriting, how are they connected? How do they play out in differing media? How do they change audiences’ views on the relationships between binaries such as past and present, other and self, and norm and deviation? Nostalgia or Perversion brings together the early Gothic novel, present-day female and black Gothic literature, Goth subculture and music, and the imagery of horror films and comic books, thus broadening the definition of ‘Gothic’ from a literary genre to a gesture of pervasive cultural criticism. The interdisciplinary analysis of nostalgia and perversion in Gothic rewriting uncovers wholly new insights into the artistic and social functions of the Gothic, making the volume useful to both scholars and students. As the essays reflect on academic as well as popular texts and media, it is also accessible to general readers. "Nostalgia or Perversion provides a sophisticated analysis of how the Gothic radically rewrites the past, not as nostalgia but as a calculated act of transgression. The past and how its reconstructions break down the boundaries between real and unreal, and normal and abnormal, is examined across a range of different media, including novels, films, comic books, television and music. The essays in this collection also address how this issue shapes Gothic formulations of race, sexuality, and gender. Both ambitious in scope and focused and rigorous in its analysis, this book provides a critically important re-evaluation of the Gothic tradition." —Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan (UK).

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Patrick Modiano (1945-) has published seventeen novels over the past twenty-seven years and is considered one of France's foremost writers. His first three works, dealing principally with the German occupation of France during World War II, are generally considered to have led to a reconsideration of the Gaullist myth which endured for twenty-five years after the war. Along with Marcel Ophuls's film, The Sorrow and the Pity, Modiano's novels opened French eyes to the more ambiguous role played during the occupation by the average French citizen. His subsequent novels have continued to probe the relationship between history, memory and fiction. This study will be of interest to readers of French fiction and history as it looks at their relation-ship to memory and shows that the three are inextricably linked in a way that enriches our understanding of our past, whether it be collective or personal. Modiano, while seemingly obsessed with his own past, in fact indicates an opening toward the future by attempting to put the past to rest in his fiction.

For three years, Ruth E. Ray visited and participated in eight writing groups at six senior centers in inner-city and suburban Detroit, looking for ways in which the elderly fashion their memories through personal narrative. Her innovative book involves the reader in the construction of life stories as a richly rewarding and highly social process that often reveals the types of relationships that dominate the lives of group members, the majority of whom are women. Because Ray wrote and responded herself and shares her anxiety and triumph in presenting her writing to women old enough to be her mother, some of a different race and class, Beyond Nostalgia is an excellent primer for professionals working with diverse groups in a variety of settings. It is also an important contribution to the emerging field of feminist gerontology. Ray's book demonstrates its own thesis that the presentation and negotiation of life stories in writing groups initiates change and personal growth among older people. Drawing on personal observations, the give-and-take of meeting conversations, lengthy interviews, and the life stories themselves, Ray tells a story of adult development through personal narrative. She recreates the group process through which age peers begin to articulate what life means, both individually and collectively. The writing groups of older adults that Ray studied challenged their members to consider not just cultural influences, but generational effects on the evolving content and structure of their life stories. Age, Ray argues, has been largely ignored by feminists and she makes a strong case for the need to learn how women make meaning of their lives across the life span. As an important document and analysis of that process, Beyond Nostalgia should appeal to academics and practitioners in women's studies, composition studies, gerontology, developmental psyschology, sociology, social work, and linguistics, and to anyone who works with older people.

The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine the complex relationships between original creative works and subsequent versions of these originals, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. The process involves the rereading, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of literary texts, paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the consideration of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, transcodification, ekphrasis, parody, translation, and revision. The interdisciplinary analyses consider works from classical antiquity to the present day, in a number of literatures, and include such topics as the reuse and resemantization of photographs and iconic images.

In this volume collaborators from different universities all over the world explore a wide variety of methods for the study of literature as cultural memory. In literature, the past may be (re)constructed in various ways and in very diverse forms. This immediately raises the question as to how one can describe and inventory the various discourses and metadiscourses of historical representation. In what sense can the rhetoric of literary historiography itself contribute to literature's function as cultural memory? Which methods of analysis are most appropriate for describing specific text types or genres as cultural memory? What have been the pragmatic uses and the ethical merits of the stability and continuity that literature has often provided for European, American, Asian and African cultures? What are the dilemmas they create for our teaching at the end of the twentieth century? To all these questions, a wide range of scholars here tries to find answers. In thorough and highly original contributions, they not only address theoretical problems, but also engage themselves in practical analyses of specific works.

Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.

This is a compelling study of the often controversial role and meaning of the new media and digital cultures in contemporary society. Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media yielded to a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. "New Media Studies" crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, which begs the question: where do we stand now; which new issues have emerged now that new media are taken for granted, and which riddles remain unsolved; and, is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how it constitutes us as 'you'. From desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to bloggging to e-learning, from role-playing games to Cybergoth music to wireless dreams, this timely volume offers a showcase of the most up-to-date research in the field from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected bilingual and bicultural writers of the United States (including Oscar Hijuelos, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eva Hoffman) and Germany (Libuse Moníková, Rafik Schami, and E. S. Özdamar, among others), developing a new framework for understanding the relationship between displacement, memory, and language. Considering themes of loss, witness, translation, identity, and exclusion, Seyhan interprets diasporic literatures as condensed archives of cultural and linguistic memory that give integrity and coherence to pasts ruptured by migration. The book next compares works by contemporary Chicana and Turkish-German women writers as innovative and sovereign literary voices within the larger national cultures of the United States and Germany. Seyhan identifies in American multiculturalism critical clues for analyzing new cultural formations in Europe and maintains that Germany's cultural transformation suggests new ways of reading the American literary mosaic. Her approach, however, extends well beyond these two literatures. She creates a critical map of a "third geography," where a transnational, multilingual literary movement is gathering momentum. Writing Outside the Nation both contributes to and departs from postcolonial studies in that it focuses specifically on transnational writers working outside of their "mother tongue" and compares American and German diasporic literatures within a sophisticated conceptual framework. It illustrates how literature's symbolic economy can reclaim lost personal and national histories, as well as connect disparate and distant cultural traditions.