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What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion

Online ISBN:
9780226493138
Print ISBN:
9780226492803
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion

Thomas Dodman
Thomas Dodman
Columbia University
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Published online:
20 September 2018
Published in print:
10 January 2018
Online ISBN:
9780226493138
Print ISBN:
9780226492803
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Nostalgia today is seen as a wistful but ultimately benign longing for the past—a positive emotion innate to all human beings. It hasn’t always been so. As the saying goes, nostalgia “ain’t what it used to be”; indeed, people used to die of it. This book unearths the forgotten history of clinical nostalgia, from the coining of the term itself in 1688 to its removal from medical discourse in the late nineteenth century. Throughout this time and across much of the North Atlantic world, “nostalgia” meant a deadly form of homesickness found especially among soldiers, slaves, and colonial settlers far from their homes. This book charts the evolving scientific and cultural debates that framed the disease, ultimately turning a precise medical term into an expansive cultural concept tied to a romantic aesthetic. At the same time, it delves into the experiences of those who suffered from homesickness on the battlefields of Napoleonic Europe or during the French conquest of North Africa, sketching a little-known page in the pre-history of modern psychiatry and war trauma. A historical emotion, born of the changes wrought by war, empire, and capitalism, nostalgia forces us to rethink the very temporalities and spatialities of modernity itself.

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