Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom. Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change. Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

This volume explores the nature of nostalgia as an important emotion in contemporary society and social theory. Situated between the ‘sociology of emotions’ and ‘nostalgia studies’, it considers the reasons for which nostalgia appears to be becoming an increasingly significant and debated emotion in late-modern culture. With chapters offering studies of nostalgia at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society, it offers insights into the rise to prominence of nostalgia and the attendant consequences. Thematically organised and examining the role of nostalgia on an individual level – in the lives of concrete individuals – as well as analysing its function on a more historical social level as a collective and culturally shared emotion, Nostalgia Now brings together the latest empirical and theoretical work on an important contemporary emotion and proposes new agendas for research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, psychology and cultural studies with interests in the emotions.

Whether it’s “Flashback Friday” or “Throwback Thursday,” audiences are hungry for nostalgic film and television, and the streaming giant Netflix serves up shows from the past that satisfy this craving, in addition to producing original contemporary content with nostalgic flavor. As a part of the series “Reboots, Remakes and Adaptations” originated by series editors Dr. Carlen Lavigne and Dr. Paul Booth, this edited volume focuses exclusively on the intersection between the Netflix platform and the current nostalgia trend in popular culture. As both a creator and distributor of media texts, Netflix takes great advantage of a wide variety of audience nostalgic responses, banking on attracting audiences who seek out nostalgic content that takes them back in time, as well as new audiences who discover “old” and reimagined content. The book aims to interrogate the complex and contradictory notions of nostalgia through the contemporary lens of Netflix, examining angles such as the Netflix business model, the impact of streaming platforms such as Netflix on the consumption of nostalgia, the ideological nature of nostalgic representation in Netflix series, and the various ways that Netflix content incorporates nostalgic content and viewer responses. Many of the contributed chapters analyze current, ongoing Netflix series, providing very timely and original analysis by established and emerging scholars in a variety of disciplines. What can we learn about our selves, our times, our cultures, in response to an examination of “Netflix and Nostalgia”?

This book examines American screen culture and its power to create and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism. Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout franchise and more.

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before. "If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough "We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul