Home Matters

Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, nostalgia may also function progressively by imaginatively securing, and mending or repairing the past. Looking at fiction by British and American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, Rubenstein explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery, mourning and emotional resolution. She argues that nostalgia is a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural or historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives address a concern in contemporary women's experience: personal and/or cultural displacement are restored—imaginatively, at least—by a vision of healing and emotional repair.

In a number of narratives by contemporary women writers, nostalgia or homesickness functions not regressively but affirmatively as a vehicle for "fixing" the past: for imaginatively transforming a character's relation to spaces, places, history, memory, and/or cultural exile or displacement.

Ruth Saxton

Rubenstein's grouping of texts and her focus on nostalgia, home, and homesickness make her book original, and her own close readings of texts are insightful.

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American Univesity and author of The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness and Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction.