This essay claims that the novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass trigger nostalgia in the contemporary reader. Nostalgia is a powerful and complex feeling which, in contemporary times, is triggered by a longing for the lost childhood. This essay connects that longing with the novels about Alice. I argue that the nostalgic experience in the Alice in Wonderland books combines utopia and Bakhtin's concept of carnival and brings it into the lost childhood. The utopian part strives for something better while the carnivalesque part is an upheaval of daily life. This essay illustrates how utopia and carnival are related to a childhood free of adulthood anxieties and that they are a part of Alice in Wonderland, which triggers nostalgia in the adult reader.

This study deals with the issue of migrants and their use of media to facilitate integration and negotiate nostalgia, identity and other social factors that ensue during the analysis of six selected Nigerian migrants in Stockholm. By means of a two-step ethnographic approach the empirical material is obtained from documented media use logs and semi-structured interviews of six Nigerian informants in Stockholm. This study sets out to discover the social factors that influence or shape the media practices of Nigerian migrants; furthermore, to understand the concept of nostalgia, integration and more descriptive concept of media use from the perspective such as: the number of years the participants have lived in Sweden, gender and ethnicity. The results show the motivation behind the media use of participants with emphasis on how Nigerian migrants use media in terms of type of medium used and frequency of use. Additionally, results show how social factors such as: ethnicity, gender, education, work and the number of years lived in Sweden play a role in influencing the media practices of the selected Nigerian migrants in Stockholm while likewise exhibiting a difference in the media practices of participants who have lived in Sweden for the same number of years. In conclusion, results display how the in number of years lived in Sweden in addition to other individual factors played a role in the media use of the participants. The results also show how the participants use media to negotiate nostalgia and ethnic identities.

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At present the literature of counter-monument studies does not account for the complex interactions of irony and nostalgia in memorial spaces. The three case studies examined in this project show that nostalgia can produce critically engaging spaces of deliberation depending on how ironic commemoration intervenes in comic or tragic frames. In order to show that more rhetorical focus is possible, I have challenged the conceptualization of counter-monument studies through what I have termed the “ironic monumental disruption.” Monument studies must address how the idea of the counter-monument, in which the "counter" supposedly resides in the artifact itself, valorizes monolithic critiques and fails to recognize that contexts, interactions, and artifacts all shape the symbolism of the commemorative site. Alternatively, ironic monumental disruptions offer critical and deliberative opportunities in their interactions with visitors and provide more conceptual insight into transitional commemorative practices. The monuments reviewed in this project initially appeared to provide additional reinforcement for escapist, capitalist narratives, but my examination of them has revealed that allowing for (ironic) commemorative contradictions provides discursive openings for publics unknowingly silenced by a lack of public deliberation. Commemorative irony produces valuable insights into the current historical moment and the representational issues created by ideological transitions. The citizens of Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Hungary express varying levels of nostalgia about their communist past, which is why the commemorative sites within these countries create a valuable spectrum of ironic and nostalgic entanglements. Commemorative irony produces valuable insights into the current historical moment and the representational issues created by ideological transitions. / text

Identifying simultaneously with the cool 1950s greaser, the punk rebel, and the zombies, murderers, and monsters of horror lore, psychobillies (“psychos”) cobble together an identity that expresses their subcultural subjectivity. They construct and cultivate an alternative present, a participatory culture that offers multiple strategies for relieving the pressures of working-class life, for experiencing pleasure despite hardship. As one research participant put it, “psychobilly is a culture of survival.” This dissertation explores the interwoven, multiple reasons why musicians and fans identify with this alternative, underground culture, tracing the integral role it plays in their lives and the ways in which psychobillies creatively reconstitute aspects of the cultural past in the present. I focus on the advantages that a tight-knit social community confers and on the ways in which various fantasies and lived practices provide transcendental escape as well as feelings of control and power. My research draws both from a long line of cultural studies and from more recent trends in popular music scholarship that focus on musical meaning in everyday life. Accordingly, I employ an ethnographic writing style that privileges the multiple voices and identities of my research associates. / text

This study consist of a comparative analysis of the nostalgic female characters in Pai Hsien-yung's two short stories: "Wandering in a Garden, Waking from a Dream," and "A Celestial in Mundane Exile," and Tennessee Williams's two plays: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Beginning with a brief discussion of the socio-historical background of Pai's Republican China and Williams's American South, a general analysis of previous scholarship on Pai and Williams's works follows. The analysis of the selected works focuses on the stylistic and symbolic features in Pai and Williams's characterizations, such as Pai's use of stream-of-consciousness, reference to the k'un opera Peony Pavilion, elaboration over descriptive details of the setting, symbolic use of clothing and accessories, and Williams's symbolic use of music genres: "Blues Piano" and the "Varsouviana Polka," and his use of rhythm and other poetic elements in his characters' speech, in the style of "personal lyricism." My study is based on a close-reading analysis of the selected works by Pai and Williams. Their humanistic approach to their respective declining aristocratic cultures and their sympathy for the nostalgic female characters' tragedies will be more apparent when the study focuses mostly on the texts themselves. Their similar belief in the universal values, such as compassion, sacrifice, and courage, has made their works comparable. In the discussion of themes, the idea of the humanistic role of literature articulated by William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize Speech is also used to connect Pai and Williams's sympathetic approach to their characters.

This thesis examines representations of nationhood, exile, belonging and nostalgia in three Palestinian memoirs: Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima (2002), Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997) and Aziz Shihab’s Does the Land Remember Me? (2007). For diasporic Palestinians (such as these three) who are denied access to Palestine as a geographical entity, Palestine exists most strongly in and through narrative. As such, I examine the extent to which these memoirs are acts of nation-building. I explore the impact that living in exile has on the authors’ construction of personal and national identity, and the extent to which exile inhibits their ability to belong. Finally, I suggest that although these memoirs do not offer explicit solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they are important as measured, reasonable and imaginative acts of nation-building that dramatize and make accessible the plight of the Palestinian nation. / This thesis also examines literary considerations such as memoir as a genre, use of figurative language, and authorial presence.

In this paper, the evocative nature of patina on stringed instruments is linked to the four agents of transformation that create it. These correspond to four nostalgic values: nostalgic reflection on the passage of time; nostalgia inspired by use; nostalgia for craftsmanship and pastoral nostalgia. Actors in the subfield of restricted cultural production of stringed instruments invoke one or more of these nostalgic values explicitly as a means to rationalize their actions to competing actors and to the broader public in their battle for status. Patina offers visible proof of their claims. Actors in the subfield of large-scale cultural production do not appeal to specific nostalgic values. Rather, they partake of the nostalgic aura surrounding antique instruments by "pasting" artificial patina onto their instruments. This serves to validate the idea of nostalgia. It also lays bare tensions existing in the broader field of cultural production over questions concerning the past and present.

In recent years there has been a body of studies relating nostalgia and fiction in political, sociological, feminist, or historical ways. This thesis, instead, sets out to perform an unusual textual study of nostalgia in modern fiction in order to work towards a poetics of nostalgia. Although the experience of emotion is private, the object of analytical discourse must be to approach this experience with objective tools. The thesis therefore develops a method for analyzing the experience of nostalgia in literary texts and then uses this method to study how nostalgia can be evoked in readers. The method works through close textual readings, developed through reader-response and narratological theories and validated through a thorough investigation of modern nostalgia in general. The result is a taxonomy of nostalgic strategies that possibly create nostalgic reactions in readers.

A Mouthful of Silence is a novel set in Manchester. It is about a middle-aged Indian man, PK Monghia, who is full of regrets and bitterness about getting old and the steady decline of his business. He still has an appetite for love and happiness, but feels trapped in his marriage to Geeta. Their only child, Sammy, is a disappointment too. Born after several miscarriages, he is the focus of excessive maternal devotion on the part of Geeta and an object of contempt in the eyes of PK, who wanted a sporty son, a reflection of his own golden youth. A new woman enters the barren landscape of PK's emotional life. She is Esther Solomon, rich, beautiful, vivacious. She is all that his life is not. She also happens to be the wife of a competitor, Cedric Solomon, who is successful and powerful and a constant reminder of what PK might have been. PK and Esther are drawn to each other and embark on a love affair that distracts PK and fills him with guilt that he pushes aside time and again. PK begins neglecting his business and his family, and he fails to notice his son's growing friendship and obsession with a more street-wise girl, Alice. Sammy gradually changes from a molly-coddled boy into a surly, uncommunicative teenager with secrets. Geeta meanwhile watches the slow unravelling of her family life, and PK is never quite sure whether she has discovered his affair. Events unfold that compel PK to make choices. He is forced to confront his ambiguous morality and to question the nature and meaning of love in all its guises. My thesis explores the main theoretical approaches surrounding diaspora and the concepts of home, belonging and nostalgia. It is my aim to extrapolate from the theoretical framework and apply their relevance and limitations to the study of the diasporic condition. My primary focus will be on the Indian diaspora within the United States and its portrayal in Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri's short fiction. More specifically, I wish to look closely at how nostalgia is both employed as a method and represented as a theme in creating and/or shaping the sense of belonging and home within their fictional narratives. Finally, I will place their work within the larger context of diaspora literature and analyse the overall diasporic literary response to established and often problematic understandings of nostalgia, home and belonging.