During the nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of children’s literature, many British writers conceptualized childhood through the lens of restorative nostalgia, writing books that attempted to re-create an idealized version of childhood that never actually existed. This has led critics of children’s literature from this era to characterize many Victorian authors’ depictions of childhood as a fictionalized adult product that serves to colonize child readers, interpellating them into adult narratives and ideologies. Edith Nesbit was well aware of this tendency, and in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), she attempts to subvert it with her child narrator, Oswald Bastable. With Oswald, Nesbit works to create a version of childhood that crosses what she calls the “great gulf” separating adult writers and child readers by activating “contraband memory.” Contraband memory is, for Nesbit, memory lacking the cloying nostalgia that makes other authors’ versions of childhood falsely idealized. Oswald begins the novel seeking to mimic the idealized memories he finds in children’s books, stealing them and reshaping them to fit his everyday life. But he soon discovers that many of these stolen memories do not play out in real life as they do in books, and Oswald ends the novel with an archive of unidealized memories that offer readers a model of resistance to the literary colonization common in children’s literature. By archiving his childhood memories before they have time to be distorted by adult nostalgia, Oswald creates the kind of contraband memory that Nesbit feels will lead to something new: the representation of more realistic versions of childhood.

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The dissertation thesis is focused on specific segment of contemporary visual artists from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Slovak Republic, whose work reflects the recent past. The thesis maps and interprets artistic reflections of the past with emphasis on the era of socialism in the region of Central Europe, and defines the characteristic features of the generation of artists born in the 70s and their position in the post-socialist situation. These artistic approaches are categorized and anchored in the broad current of the so-called historiographical turn in contemporary art and put in a broader cultural and art historical context. Keywords contemporary art, Central Europe, historiographic turn, archive, socialist modernism, nostalgia

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The sensation of detachment and reclusion frequently gives rise to an uncanny and dreamlike space. Enveloped within this dimension, the quirks of memory become a fragile lifeline to bygone, intangible ideas of reality. Fixated on this threshold, my artistic explorations in print, collage, and assemblage navigates these elusive realms, rendering fragmented and distant shapes and figures in stark contrast to elements that evoke an eerie sense of familiarity. In this manner, my work invites viewers to embrace the disconcerting and unsettling aspects of the in-between, all the while establishing an unsettling connection to reality through the lens of nostalgic objects and imagery.

Through a comprehensive analysis of literary and documentary material from 1270–1500, this study offers insights into the history and significance of the late medieval string instrument known as the gittern in Western Europe. Source criticism and hermeneutics form the basis of the critical reading of the nearly hundred sources. Through these, a more refined history of the instrument is suggested, focusing on social, symbolic and musical change throughout the period. The gittern is shown to have been an instrument predominately used in noble and royal milieus for half a century before being more widely played among all ranks of society. When its popularity faded in the 15th century, it became a symbol of nostalgia. The sound and playing techniques of the gittern were well suited for the music of the late 14th century, and the decline in use was simultaneous to the developments of new genres and compositional techniques where other sounds were sought.