What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion by Thomas Dodm

Description: What Nostalgia Was by Thomas Dodman In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasnt 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, Dodman traces its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleons 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 encompassed Romantic notions of the aesthetic pleasure of suffering. But the decisive shift toward its contemporary meaning occurred in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view 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. Author Biography Thomas Dodman is assistant professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Nostalgia as a Historical Problem 1 * Nostalgia in 1688 2 * The Reasons of a Passion 3 * The Lost Pays of the Patrie 4 * Mothers and Sons in the Time of Napoleonic War 5 * Golden Age 6 * Nostalgia in the Tropics 7 * Ubi bene, ibi patria : Nostalgia Fin de Si Review "Through painstaking analysis of medical treatises and dissertations, as well as military and literary sources, Dodman provides an important longue durée exploration of the rise and fall of nostalgia as a medical malady, akin to treatment of hysteria and other shifting, and gendered, diagnoses. Studies of this kind are essential to show how emotions play out in distinct historical moments, how they are political and politicized, and connect to ideas about identity in the past as in the present."-- "Isis""What Nostalgia Was is undoubtedly the best of the new wave of nostalgia studies. Dodman recounts the history of nostalgia in richly contextualized detail with thorough research and thoughtful, persuasive interpretations. This book is an impressive achievement."-- "Mark Micale, University of Illinois""What Nostalgia Was is by far the most thorough and interesting investigation ever written into how physicians and others came to define a disease they labeled nostalgia and how the phenomenon evolved over the two centuries from 1688 to 1884. Remarkably creative and original, this book has significant implications for how we understand the history of the emotions, the history of psychiatry, and the history of modern European society."-- "David A. Bell, Princeton University""Dodman (French, Columbia Univ.) delves into the history of the medical and non-medical diagnoses of nostalgia. His research took him into various archives of the French military, and these archives inform his analysis and presentation. As a medical phenomenon, nostalgia first came to prominence as a condition affecting French troops deployed in faraway places (though definitions of faraway varied with each sufferer). Nostalgia extended beyond feelings of homesickness; its symptoms could result in major physical disability and even death. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, military surgeons and doctors increasingly used the diagnosis to help conscripted soldiers combating illness and to elevate their own status in the military. Later, French imperialism in North Africa both revived and challenged the medical diagnosis of nostalgia. As the age of scientific medicine dawned, nostalgia gradually lost its standing as a creditable diagnosis and was relegated to the realm of (non-medical) emotions. Dodson argues that medical nostalgias shifting dimensions over time illustrate a dynamic modernism; the case he builds in this text is perhaps its greatest achievement. Highly recommended."-- "CHOICE""Today the word [nostalgia] connotes poignancy more than suffering, but Dodmans What Nostalgia Was reminds us that nostalgia once referred to a severe and potentially fatal kind of melancholy."-- "Inside Higher Ed" Review Quote " What Nostalgia Was is undoubtedly the best of the new wave of nostalgia studies. Dodman recounts the history of nostalgia in richly contextualized detail with thorough research and thoughtful, persuasive interpretations. This book is an impressive achievement." Details ISBN022649294X Author Thomas Dodman Pages 304 Publisher The University of Chicago Press Series Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning ISBN-10 022649294X ISBN-13 9780226492940 Format Paperback Imprint University of Chicago Press Subtitle War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion Place of Publication Chicago, IL Country of Publication United States Illustrations 17 halftones DEWEY 302.1 Media Book Year 2018 Short Title What Nostalgia Was Language English UK Release Date 2018-01-05 Publication Date 2018-01-05 NZ Release Date 2018-01-05 US Release Date 2018-01-05 Audience Professional & Vocational AU Release Date 2018-01-04 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:117391289;

Price: 90.77 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2024-10-25T10:10:10.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD