This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread, yet often misunderstood, condition - nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national, historical, and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world, and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of "Bushman" song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

About the Author

Dennis Walder is Professor of Literature at the Open University. His publications include Dickens and Religion, Athol Fugard (whose work he has also edited), Post-Colonial Literatures in English, and the bestselling reader Literature in the Modern World.

Reviews

"Postcolonial Nostalgias is an ambitious and riveting work of literary criticism, spanning more than a century of realistic writing and thematically connecting postcolonial representations of Trinidad/West Indies, the Islamic World, India, Japan England, South Africa, Germany, Nigeria, and China - historically, psychologically, and aesthetically...the indisputable scholarly value rest[s] on its author's wide knowledge of contemporary literature, expert command of history, impressive handling of theory, and delightfully readable prose." -R. Victoria Arana, Howard University, College Literature

" richly resourceful and insightful." --Ashok K Mohapatra, Sambalpur University, Postcolonial Text

"Dennis Walder's study is refreshingly different. Not only does it exhort a re-evaluation of the critical and reflective functions of nostalgic memory, but places this enterprise within a literary and historical framework that goes beyond typical postcolonial fare." --Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Book Information
ISBN 9780415628297
Author Dennis Walder
Format Paperback
Page Count 214
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 240g