Nostalgia for steam trains in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries offers a further example of the varying responses to railways evident ever since their first development in the nineteenth century. Several of these responses contributed to, and illustrate, the changing roles of temporality, memory and nostalgia in the literature of the modern period. In particular, though modernist literature is often critical of the contribution railways and their timetabling made to the mechanisation of the modern age, the writers concerned also develop affirmatively the new possibilities of momentary, memorable vision which rapid travel offered to the imagination. The development of this kind of vision in modernist writing allows certain forms of intense memory to be recognized as historically specific, though also, as always, shaped by nostalgia’s idiosyncratic, personal aspects.
Walter Benjamin's image of the backward-looking angel of history dates from 1944 but is also relevant to earlier parts of the twentieth century, especially after August 1914. Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier is paradigmatic in theme and form of a well-charted modernist inclination toward retrospection. Comparable forms of nostalgia for the Edwardian period persist in 1930s fiction and are explored in this essay, along with an inheritance of modernist narrative techniques, in novels including The Memorial, Eyeless in Gaza, A Scots Quair, and Coming Up for Air. The essay considers the persistence of similar forms and feelings in the 1940s and later, and speculates about their wider role within narrative generally, including in earlier historical periods, and about conclusions that may be drawn about the development of the novel in the twentieth century.
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