Contemporary Nostalgia Edited by Niklas Salmose Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Humanities www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Contemporary Nostalgia Contemporary Nostalgia Special Issue Editor Niklas Salmose MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Niklas Salmose Linnaeus University Sweden Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ humanities/special issues/Contemporary Nostalgia). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03921-556-0 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03921-557-7 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of Wikimedia user jarekt. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Cass Scenic Railroad State Park - Shay 11 - 05.jpg. c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Niklas Salmose Nostalgia Makes Us All Tick: A Special Issue on Contemporary Nostalgia Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 144, doi:10.3390/h8030144 .................... 1 Randall Stevenson ‘Vision Isolated in Eternity’: Nostalgia Catches the Train Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 95, doi:10.3390/h7040095 .................... 6 Lara Rodr´ıguez Sieweke Nostalgic Nuances in Media in the Red Book Magazine Version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy” Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 131, doi:10.3390/h7040131 .................... 13 Nanny Jolma ‘As If There Was No Fear’: Exploring Nostalgic Narrative in Bo Carpelan’s Novel Berg Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 106, doi:10.3390/h7040106 .................... 30 Maria Freij Into the Texan Sunset: Metanostalgia, Retro-, and Introspection in Lars Gustafsson’s “Where the Alphabet Has Two Hundred Letters” Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 103, doi:10.3390/h7040103 .................... 42 Kamila Mirasova Peculiarities of Nostalgia in Ayn Rand’s Novel Atlas Shrugged Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 121, doi:10.3390/h7040121 .................... 52 Marie-Agn`es Gay “The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past”: The Ambivalent Call of Nostalgic Memory in Richard Ford’s Short Story “Calling” (A Multitude of Sins, 2001) Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 11, doi:10.3390/h8010011 .................... 61 Catherine Delesalle-Nancey Atoning for Nostalgia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 105, doi:10.3390/h7040105 .................... 73 Eva Kingsepp The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia: The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 113, doi:10.3390/h7040113 .................... 82 Menna Agha Nubia Still Exists: On the Utility of the Nostalgic Space Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 24, doi:10.3390/h8010024 .................... 98 Amrita Ghosh Subverting the Nation-State Through Post-Partition Nostalgia: Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 19, doi:10.3390/h8010019 ....................110 v Ana Petrov Yugonostalgia as a Kind of Love: Politics of Emotional Reconciliations through Yugoslav Popular Music Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 119, doi:10.3390/h7040119 ....................120 LuboˇsPt´aˇcek Ostalgia in Czech Films about Normalisation Created Post-1989 Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 118, doi:10.3390/h7040118 ....................136 Lena Ahlin Nostalgia, Motherhood, and Adoption: Two Contemporary Swedish Examples Reprinted from: Humanities 2019, 8, 8, doi:10.3390/h8010008 .....................147 P´eter Krist´of Makai Video Games as Objects and Vehicles of Nostalgia Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 123, doi:10.3390/h7040123 ....................158 Thomas Leitch There’s No Nostalgia Like Hollywood Nostalgia Reprinted from: Humanities 2018, 7, 101, doi:10.3390/h7040101 ....................172 vi About the Special Issue Editor Niklas Salmose, Dr., holds a Ph.D. in English from University of Edinburgh and was a visiting Professor at UCLA autumn 2018. He is currently Vice-Chair of the Department of Languages at Linnaeus University, Sweden and the Program Coordinator for the Master Program in English Language and Literature (MELL). He has published and presented internationally on nostalgia, Nordic noir, Hitchcock, cinematic style in fiction, modernism, the Anthropocene and Hollywood, animal horror, intermediality and sensorial aesthetics in fiction. He edited an issue on the Anthropocene for the journal Ekfrase 2016, a special issue on contemporary nostalgia for the journal Humanities 2018 and a book on experimental Swedish filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson. He is presently editing the volume Transmediations. Communication Across Media Borders for Routledge. At Linnaeus University, he is a member of the Linnaeus University Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS). One of his main research fields is the work and life of F. Scott Fitzgerald; he translated and edited Fitzgerald’s short story collection All the Sad Young Men into Swedish 2014. He is co-editing a composite biography on Fitzgerald together with Dr. David Rennie as well as the new Oxford Classic reissue of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. In November 2018 he was the third annual McDermott lecturer at the University Faculty Club in St. Paul for the Fitzgerald in St. Paul Society. vii humanities Editorial Nostalgia Makes Us All Tick: A Special Issue on Contemporary Nostalgia Niklas Salmose Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, 351 95 Växjö, Sweden; [email protected] Received: 5 August 2019; Accepted: 26 August 2019; Published: 28 August 2019 Introduction Nostalgia makes us all tick: It engages. We live in societies oriented towards the now and the tomorrow, in a world obsessed with a complex and protean present seemingly impervious to historical continuity. The many tomorrows inherent in every new technology, product, and digitally mediated event drive us further away from our collective histories. Yet the present seems stubbornly rooted in the past, as Zygmunt Bauman so convincingly argues in his final work Retrotopia (Bauman 2017). This occurs both politically, as in the repeated re-ignition of history’s buried fires, ranging from the emergence of ISIS as an ultranostalgic force to the re-emergence of a nostalgic hard-right in European politics, and culturally, as in the persistent return of cultural production and consumption to a number of key points in our history in a restless and always unsatisfied attempt to reinterpret, reuse, or replay that which is seemingly vanished. It appears in the most pressing issue of our times, climate change, and the discourse of the Anthropocene. This retrospective orientation is observable in all major contemporary media forms, aesthetic and social practices. Romantic inclination towards the past might seem irrational, but our emotional connections to our own biographies, as well as a collective solidarity with our childhoods, traditions, imaginations, anticipations, and dreams may also be a rational response to modern instability. Nostalgia, then, appears increasingly to be a modality of its own with major potential for understanding how our now is shaped by our then, both individually and collectively. Whether we are inclined, personally, to be nostalgic or we are somehow bound up in the external and contextual nostalgic webs, nostalgia dictates our lives. Beyond the intimate bittersweet immersions of nostalgia, conjured by aging, remembrance, death, time, childhood, loss, recovery, and melancholia, we are influenced by such things as retro shops, local produce, concepts of national states, xenophobia, communities, technology advancement, migration, and the climate crisis. The world we inhabit is just constantly shaped by private and public nostalgias. One way to make sense of the complex flux of emotions and temporalities on our planet in modern, contemporary times is to investigate and scrutinize the role nostalgia has on our daily lives, in politics, equality, sociology, psychology, history, art, philosophy. These examinations are truly interdisciplinary. The purpose of this editorial is not to introduce each essay in this collection (the abstracts will do just fine here), neither is it to survey the history of nostalgia. My ambition, albeit limited in scope here, is to frame and problematize the works in this collection within the emerging field of nostalgia studies and reiterate some of my previous views on nostalgia as an emotional experience and an aesthetic modality. Nostalgia studies have the past decade gained interest and importance in a variety of disciplines, often in a complex interaction between different disciplines such as art, history, literary studies, aesthetics, film and media studies, communication studies, intermedial studies, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, history of ideas, and colonial and postcolonial studies. Although nostalgia