Remembering the Pleasant Bits: Nostalgia and the Legacies of Modernism

Abstract

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.

Literature and Modern Time

“…Randall Stevenson identifies the tetralogy as one of a number of modernist novels of the 1920s that has the 'inclination to look back over the war's "pile of debris" toward the sunnier landscape of a preceding belle époque'. 48 The series starts with Tietjens and Macmaster on the train to play golf at Rye with other dignitaries, pointing to the importance of time in the tetralogy and evoking the temporal developments of the preceding century. The opening paragraph reads:…”