A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of NostalgiaUniversity of Delaware Press, 2006 - 221 pages This book examines the emergence of a new genre during the eighteenth century: the nostalgia poem. This genre is best understood by reconceiving the premises of nostalgia itself, examining it as first and foremost a mode of idealization rather than a longing for the past. From the poems that make up this genre, we have derived many of our modern ideas and images of nostalgia. In tracing the history of the nostalgia poem, this book also traces a pattern of tropic change, in which a new genre is built around tropes extracted from the dying genres. This new genre then begins producing its own tropes; in the case of the nostalgia poem, these include idealized school days and ruined villages. As these tropes become overly familiar, the nostalgia poem genre itself begins to fall apart. This book reevaluates poems ranging from Dryden's Hastings elegy to Crabbe's The Village, showing how works as varied as Gray's Eton College Ode, Macpherson's forged epics, and Goldsmith's The Deserted Village are all part of a doomed literary experiment - an experiment that has nevertheless determined the course of modern nostalgic thought. |
Contents
7 | |
Elegiac and Pastoral Nostalgia | 27 |
Gray and the Emergence of the Modern Nostalgia Poem | 56 |
Varieties of Historical Nostalgia from Gray to Beattie | 88 |
Goldsmith and the Poetics of Nostalgia | 122 |
Cowper Crabbe and MockNostalgia | 150 |
The Present and Future of Nostalgia | 182 |
211 | |
Common terms and phrases
Alexander Pope ancient appear audience Bard basic Beattie Beattie's become Book celebration century characters Chatterton childhood Clarendon classical conventional Cowper Crabbe Crabbe's create critics cultural describes Deserted Village Dryden Dunciad early Eclogue edition Edwin eighteenth eighteenth-century poetry elegiac nostalgia elegy empiricism empiricist English epic Eton College ode example experience familiar genre georgic Golden Age Gray's happy historical nostalgia idea idyllic Iliad imagery images imagines innocent inspired language literary London longing lost Macpherson memory Minstrel modern nostalgia mourning narrator nature nostalgia poem nostalgic idealization nostalgic poetry nostalgic tropes Oliver Goldsmith Ossian Oxford particular passage past Pastoral Poetry pastoral world Percy Percy's pleasure poem's poetic nostalgia poets political Pope Pope's present reader realistic recognize reflection Reliques rhetorical ruin rural satire scenes sentiment shepherd simple strategy talgia themes Thomas Chatterton Thomas Gray tion traditional tropic change University Press vision vols William Cowper words Wordsworth youth
Popular passages
Page 11 - Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease, Seats of my youth, when every sport could please...