On Sale: Aug 5, 2008
Page Count: 352 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9780786724871

$15.99

$20.99 CAD

Format

Format:

ebook $15.99 $20.99 CAD
Trade Paperback $22.99 $29.99 CAD

Buy from Other Retailers:

From an award-winning cultural theorist, the classic work on the intricate relationship between longing and belonging

“A remarkable book… brilliant.”―New York Times

Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century.

Genre:

“A remarkable book… brilliant.”
New York Times
“Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia is a massive, sophisticated and brilliant study… a rewarding cross-genre book.”
Globe and Mail
“Erudite and witty, fact-filled and deeply-felt, this moving meditation on the vicissitudes of time, loss and longing will provoke us to think anew about the ambiguities of our collective sensibility and the perennial needs of the individual soul.”
Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
“Svetlana Boym’s brilliant, witty, ironic, penetrating dissection of ‘nostalgia,’ in all its manifestations – nationalist, diasporic, exilic, literary, personal – is, above all, deeply moving. In casting a cool but tender eye on the contradictions of everyday existence today, this is a unique book.”
Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox
“Dazzling erudition, sexy narrative drive, and an elegant aesthetic sensibility make The Future of Nostalgia a work of profound insight and intellectual excitement… an indispensable book for anyone trying to make sense of the twentieth century.”
Larry Wolff, author of Inventing Eastern Europe

Svetlana Boym

About the Author

Svetlana Boym (1959-2015) was a writer and professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard. She is the author of Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia and Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, as well as short stories, plays, and a novel.

Learn more about this author

×

Contributors

Formats and Prices

Price