The outpouring of support for the monarchy surrounding the passing of Elisabeth II and the coronation of Charles III; the evocation of a “Blitz spirit” during the COVID-19 lockdowns; “Put the Great back in Britain”, one of the battle cries of the Brexiteers: All of these examples are ultimately expressions of nostalgia, the longing for a “Merry Old England” that never truly existed. In our period of “culture wars” and renewed reckoning with Empire and Race, what can Britain’s relationship with its imagined past tell us about where we are today?
In this seminar, we will explore literature, art and movies that evoke and build on such nostalgia. We will discover that nostalgia is by no means a modern phenomenon, but a constitutive element of cultural memory and national identity: we will find it in lockdown poetry, in war films, in Edwardian children’s books and Gothic novels, in the works of the Arts & Crafts movement and the Pre-Raphaelites, in poems of the Romantics, and in several key texts of the Enlightenment and Renaissance.
On our journey back in time we will encounter many British cultural icons and mythic figures and - who knows? - might come to the realisation that people have always been longing for “the good old days”.
A reader will be made available on Moodle before the beginning of the semester. |
