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... not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
-Walter Benjamin
Nostalgia inspires good one-liners. It is 'a sadness without an object' (Stewart, 1993, 23), home-sickness for 'a home one never had' (Boym, 2001, xvi), 'a romance with one's own fantasy' (Boym, 2001, xvi); it thrives on the finality of death (Shaw and Chase, 1989, 5-6). These epigrams construct nostalgia as a single condition, and perhaps because of its origins in pathology, as an ineluctable and unitary condition, like being chronically ill or melancholy, or being in love. I want to suggest in this study of nostalgia in Walter Scott that as readers our experience is different from what the one-liners suggest. The difference between nostalgia as a perceived condition of modernity (like a medical 'condition') and nostalgia as a diverse set of poetic and narrative effects is hard to maintain in practice, but broadly speaking, this study treats the medievalist nostalgia it examines not as a fixed state, a totalising syndrome, but as an occurrence in writing and reading the relation of the present to the past, which can be accompanied with, mixed up in, and contested by other ways of writing and reading that relation.
In Malcolm Chase's and Christopher Shaw's summary of the conditions empowering historical nostalgia, there are two essentials. First, time must be seen as linear with an undetermined 'secular' future. If one lives without a sense of time passing, or thinks time goes in recurrent cycles, or anticipates a redeemed future, then one will not idealize the past. Second, the present must be seen to be deficient. Nostalgia is essentially a form of protest against the present (Shaw and Chase, 1989, 2-3). In my view, insistence on these conditions together tends to preserve, intact, a pure form of historical 'nostalgia' as a notional category - just as some scholars of medieval literature like to extract a pure form of 'chivalry' from its messy textual representations - but this is a misleading practice. For instance, why should not nostalgia occur even in those who anticipate a redeemed future? Human feelings are complex, variously contingent and historically specific, without the consistency of philosophical propositions. George Herbert, expecting everything written in Revelation to occur, was still...