Within the past decades, nostalgia has become a misleadingly familiar concept. Whereas popular nostalgia connotes an idealised memory of the past, nost/algia implies a novelty of approach by focusing on the distinction between nostos (the return) and algos (the pain). Discussed with a reference to the pastoral and the Odyssey, the present study examines certain complex deployments of the mode as applied in several autobiographical narratives of two ex-patriate writers, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. The book first traces the history and theory of autobiography and nostalgia. Second, it interprets the nostalgic tensions as complex structures of thought which prompt certain inferences about the writers respective attitudes towards the world and their inner selves.
Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ignatianum Jesuit University in Krakow, Poland. She has published a monograph on the pastoral, co-edited a volume on William Shakespeare, and written articles on nostalgia, pastoral, and modernist prose.
Introduction - 1. The nostalgic design: Simple and complex nostalgia - 2. Auto/ bio/ graphical narration: Genre, mode, and nostalgia - 3. Bios: The world reference - 4. Autos: (Up)rootedness and the self - 5. Graphe: Writing oneself - Conclusion - References
The book explores nost/algia as a complex structure of thought. Alongside theoretical concerns, nost/algia is discussed as a mode operating through the tensions in the images of the past. In reference to the pastoral and the Odyssey, the book examines the deployment of the mode in Joseph Conrads and Henry Jamess autobiographical prose
