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Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, the longing associated with nostalgia may also function progressively as a vehicle for imaginatively 'fixing' the past in two senses: securing and mending or repairing. Considering fiction by two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, this study explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery. Rubenstein argues that nostalgia functions narratively as a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives re-frame a significant locus of concern in contemporary (female) experience: personal and/or cultural dis-placement and longing for home are ultimately transmuted - imaginatively, at least - by a restorative vision that enables healing and emotional repair.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
ROBERTA RUBENSTEIN is Professor of Literature at American University, where she teaches courses in fiction by women, feminist theory, and modernism. She is the author of
The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness
(1979) and
Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction
(1987), and is co-editor of an anthology of international short stories,
Worlds of Fiction
(Macmillan/Prentice-Hall, 1993). She has published more than thirty articles on modern and contemporary women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrision, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Barbara Kingsolver, and others.
Zusammenfassung
Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, the longing associated with nostalgia may also function progressively as a vehicle for imaginatively 'fixing' the past in two senses: securing and mending or repairing. Considering fiction by two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, this study explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery. Rubenstein argues that nostalgia functions narratively as a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives re-frame a significant locus of concern in contemporary (female) experience: personal and/or cultural dis-placement and longing for home are ultimately transmuted - imaginatively, at least - by a restorative vision that enables healing and emotional repair.
Zusatztext
'Rubenstein's grouping of texts and her focus on nostalgia, home, and homesickness make her book original, and her own close readings of texts are insightful. She is a distinguished scholar.' - Ruth Saxton, editor of The Girl
Bericht
'Rubenstein's grouping of texts and her focus on nostalgia, home, and homesickness make her book original, and her own close readings of texts are insightful. She is a distinguished scholar.' - Ruth Saxton, editor of The Girl
