A01=Thomas Dodman
affect
Author_Thomas Dodman
belonging
Category=NHD
colonialism
colonies
deployment
disease
emotions
Empire
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
France
history
homesickness
illegitimate
interracial children
longing
marriage
Medicine
melancholy
mental illness
military
miscegenation
modernity
napoleonic war
nonfiction
Nostalgia
race
romanticism
science
sexuality
soldiers
suffering
tropics
wistfulness
Product details
- ISBN 9780226492803
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jan 2018
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman begins his story in Basel, where a nineteen-year-old medical student invented the new diagnosis, modeled on prevailing notions of melancholy. From there, he traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, as French soldiers far from home were diagnosed and treated for the disease. Nostalgia then gradually transformed from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, one that connected to Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift towards a benign emotion occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about excessive creolization came to view a moderate homesickness as salutary.
An afterword reflects on how the history of nostalgia can help us understand the transformations of the modern world, rounding out a surprising, fascinating tour through the history of a durable idea.
Thomas Dodman is assistant professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
