“Our flame, the will-o’-the-wisp that dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade” – Modern Literary Nostalgia as Death Mood

• Authors: Niklas Salmose
• Conference: 4th International Interdisciplinary Memory Conference “Memory, Melancholy and Nostalgia” (17-18 Semptember, 2015 in Gdansk)
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article argues that there is a difference between nostalgic emotion and nostalgic mood and that the latter one often is a result of nostalgia’s inevitable link to death, entropy and teleology. It examines how nostalgic tropes, such as ruins, childhood, youth, astronomical representations, and subjective time (duration), inherited from the romantic poetry function as, and create, nostalgic death moods and retardations of eschatology in modernist fiction.

Keywords

Nostalgia; modernist fiction; modernism; death; emotions; mood; entropy; teleology; childhood; youth; duration; Bergson; ruins; astronomy

• Publisher: Wydział Filologiczny Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego
• Journal: Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne
• Year: 2018
• Issue: 9 "Memory, Melancholy and Nostalgia"
• Pages: 109-122

Contributors

author

Niklas Salmose

• Linnaeus University in Växjö (Sweden) =, Department of Languages

References

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.26881/jk.2018.9.10