Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, the longing associated with nostalgia may also function progressively as a vehicle for imaginatively 'fixing' the past in two senses: securing and mending or repairing. Considering fiction by two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, this study explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery. Rubenstein argues that nostalgia functions narratively as a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives re-frame a significant locus of concern in contemporary (female) experience: personal and/or cultural dis-placement and longing for home are ultimately transmuted - imaginatively, at least - by a restorative vision that enables healing and emotional repair.
Introduction: Home Matters, Longing and Belonging PART ONE: IS MOTHER HOME? Yearning and Nostalgia: Fiction and Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing PART TWO: DISPLACEMENTS OF/FROM HOME Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams , Barbara Kingsolver Home/lands and Contested Motherhood: The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven , Barbara Kingsolver Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home: How the García Girls Lost their Accents , Julia Alvarez PART THREE: MIDLIFE NOSTALGIA AND CULTURAL MOURNING Homesickness and the Five Stages of Grief: Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler Hom(e)age to the Ancestors: Praisesong for the Widow , Paule Marshall Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence: Jazz , Toni Morrison PART FOUR: NOSTALGIA FOR PARADISE Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations: Mama Day , Gloria Naylor Amazing Grace: Longing for Paradise and the Good Mother: Paradise , Toni Morrison Conclusion: Fixing the Past, Re-Placing Nostalgia
