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Both pathological homesickness and its normative descendent, nostalgia, have generally been regarded as affective rather than mnemonic experiences, conditions dominated by desire and emotion at the expense of memory (Davis, 1979; Roth, 1993; Colley, 1998; Dames, 2001; Goodman, 2008). In the beginning, to suffer from homesickness was to revolt against the army camp, the city, the school, and engage in hyperbolic or fabricated memories of home (Rosen, 1975; Austin, 2007, 1-5). And still, to feel nostalgia is to experience an affective memory, one with a disposition in favor of the past. Obviously affective nostalgia retains a mnemonic component, but the idea of it as a failed form of memory - a misremembering or inability to remember - persists and marks, if not the earliest, then one of its early manifestations, the medievalism that in various esthetic forms proved so instrumental in forming a popular sense of history and a national identity in the nineteenth century. These aesthetic and cultural medievalisms actually involve a specific form of memory: to examine it and its precise relation to the affects and emotions, I turn to three instances from late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century nostalgias: the first comes from Carlyle's anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic screed Past and Present (1843), the second from Radcliffe's tourist-diary, Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795). The third is connected with the gothic revival in architecture represented, each very differently, by A.W.N. Pugin in Contrasts (1836) and Eastlake in A History of the Gothic Revival (1872). All three instances rest on an idea of a prototypical nostalgic experience - a specific moment open to analysis. And each of these embedded moments reveals a form of memory responsible for the peculiar emotional resonance of normative nostalgia and for the sense of continuity it forges with a national past.
I begin with some fundamentals: nostalgia belongs, or appears to belong, to secondary memory - that is, to recollecting the preterite past. Nostalgic remembering is rarely limited to 'remembering simpliciter ,' that is, remembering a thing or incident simply or abstractly, separated from its sensuous context, like one's old phone number (Casey, 1987a, 52-53). More often it is an indefinitely expandable memory in a sensuous format, which recalling an old phone number might release; or it...