This book addresses the multiple meanings of nostalgia in the literature of the period. Whether depicted as an emotion, remembrance, or fixation, these essays demonstrate that the nostalgic impulse reveals how deeply rooted in the damaged, the old, and the vanishing, were the variety of efforts to imagine and produce the new—the distinctly modern.

In the world of architectural conservation, there is little tolerance for reconstructing or even protecting historic facades when everything behind is modern, and even less for reconstructing a building that has been completely destroyed. These offenses are considered lies against history. In this thoughtful, revealing work, conservation expert Wim Denslagen traces this predilection for honesty to the legacy of Functionalism, a Romantic-era movement that denounced the building of pseudo-architecture in favor of a new, rational form of building. With detailed analyses of headline-making restoration projects from Bruges to Berlin, Denslagen shows that the adoption of these romantic values by conservationists gave rise to a new wave of modern additions and transformations.

Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, xenophobia, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art-historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in, painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naifs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918.

In the first chapter on the German military’s unlikely function as an incubator of modernist art and in the second chapter on Adolf Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future perfection of the German Volk, Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was inconsistent. In further chapters, on the appropriation of Christian iconography in constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia and on Baldur von Schirach’s heretical patronage of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna, Maertz reveals that sponsorship of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously unexamined evidence, including 10,000 works of art and documents confiscated by the U.S. Army, Maertz’s final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German artists during the Allied occupation, which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art world.

In this wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of time, Agacinski weaves together discussions of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Baudelaire, Barthes, and especially Walter Benjamin--her model for the modern "passer of time"--as she traces a time-line of the philosophy of time.

Some of the most pressing contemporary issues (ecological crisis, migration and integration, fragmented worldviews, social media, fake news, extremist politics and terrorism) can be understood more profoundly through how they interact with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Nostalgia is politics, but these politics are also interwoven with media and culture. Notwithstanding how nostalgia is used or contextualized in terms of politics and social practices, commodification or personal development, its power is primarily situated within its efficacy as a governing, influential human emotion. The vast and luminous contributions to this special issue on contemporary nostalgia are all investigating the role different aesthetic media formats (film, music, literature, computer games) plays in nostalgic negotiations with style, history, migration, love, nationalism, diaspora, irony, modernity, colonial and postcolonial discourses, and adoption. Mutually, these essays stand out as important, original, critical contributions to the expanding field of nostalgia studies and offer a valued insight on our world.

Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.