NOSTALGIA

The longing to return to a lost homeland becomes a central feature of the Western literary tradition long before the term “nostalgia” was coined to describe it. Homer's first image of Odysseus is of him sitting alone on the island of Ogygia, weeping, pining for his beloved Ithaca. Despite offers by the goddess Calypso to take him as a spouse and grant him immortality, Odysseus desires nothing more than to return to the place of his birth – even after Calypso foretells of the hardships he must bear before reaching his home. This first “narrative of return” establishes a pattern that continues to compel writers even now in the twenty-first century. In the past century, some of the most distinguished Anglophone writers from across the globe have rewritten the Homeric tale, including the expatriate Irishman James Joyce, the St. Lucian Derek Walcott, and the American Charles Frazier. Long after it has become cliché to say that “you can't go home again” – long after it has become widely recognized that nostalgic homelands frequently exist only in the imagination – literary texts continue to depict characters defined by their longing to return.

Although twentieth-century literary texts share the Homeric preoccupation with lost homelands, they are produced in environments in which nostalgia is subject to stark criticism. Perhaps the most widely cited academic study of nostalgia, Susan Stewart's On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, characterizes it as a “social disease.”