Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion

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'Absorbing' - The Guardian 'Arnold-Forster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide . . . She carries weighty learning lightly - embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology.' - The Telegraph In Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from its first identification in seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies). Nostalgia is a social and political emotion, vulnerable to misuse, and one that reflects the anxieties of the age. It is one of the many ways we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction with the present and our visions for the future. Arnold-Forster's fascinating history of this complex, slippery emotion is a lens through which to consider the changing pace of society, our collective feelings of regret, dislocation and belonging, the conditions of modern and contemporary work, and the politics of fear and anxiety. It is also a clear-eyed analysis of what we are doing now, how we feel about it and what we might want to change about the world we live in. 'Arnold-Forster belongs to that valuable non-jargon-spouting breed of academic who is capable of explaining complex ideas in simple language.' - The Times

Reviews

This absorbing exploration of nostalgia raises questions about its slippery nature, and shows how it has been chillingly deployed in politics, from the cold war to Trumpism * Guardian *
Arnold-Forster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide. Her prose is fluent but not flashy . . . She carries weighty learning lightly embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology.' * The Telegraph *
Beautifully compact, wide-ranging and enjoyable * TLS *
Illuminating * Vogue *
With its juicy readability and historical wanderings, Nostalgia evidences the flaws of memory, and how it cherry picks the pleasant elements of the good old days * nb. *

Author Bio

Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster is a historian at the University of Edinburgh. She has also worked at McGill University, King's College London, UCL, and at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of two academic books, one about cancer and the other about surgery, and has written widely for academic, medical and mainstream outlets. She has also appeared on BBC Radio and TV, consulted for television dramas and documentaries, and worked closely with the Science Museum, the Wellcome Collection and the Royal College of Nursing. She lives in London.