ABSTRACT
Nostalgia in a curious way connects people across historical as well as national and personal boundaries. I call it curious because I cannot think of a better word for describing that strange, even uncanny mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for remembered times and places that constitutes it, and which seems to become prominent at certain critical periods of human history, including our own. Nostalgia was fi rst named in the mid seventeenth century, and fi rst emerged widely during the rise of industrialisation in modern Europe, when the writings of the European Romantics challenged what was happening in the world by exploring-as
Rousseau and Goethe and Wordsworth explored-the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual. During the nineteenth century it was of central importance in writers and thinkers as far apart as Dickens and Turgenev or Ruskin and Nietzsche, an importance heightened in the early twentieth century by the works of Bergson, Freud, and Proust. Nearer our own time, the rise in migration and exile accompanying the ends of empire and the disasters of war explored by writers as varied as Doris Lessing and W. G. Sebald, Chinua Achebe and J. G. Ballard, has led to a representation of the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history.
