Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945

 
In the Anthropocene, as climate change renders environments less stable, the human desire for place underscores the weakness of the individual in the face of the world. In this book, Ryan Hediger introduces a distinctive notion of homesickness, one in which the longing for place demonstrates not only human vulnerability but also intersubjectivity beyond the human. Arguing that this feeling is unavoidable and characteristically posthumanist, Hediger studies the complex mix of attitudes toward home, the homely, and the familiar in an age of resurgent cosmopolitanism, especially eco-cosmopolitanism.

Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate.

Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language. 

Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia’s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck’s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia’s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia’s wistful yearning for the past. Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy.

2017 Mountain Heritage Literary Festival Appalachian Book of the Year 

One day, Jesse Donaldson wakes up in Portland, Oregon, and asks his wife to uproot their life together and move to his native Kentucky. As he searches for the reason behind this sudden urge, Donaldson examines both the place where he was born and the life he’s building.

The result is a hybrid—part memoir, part meditation on nostalgia, part catalog of Kentucky history and myth. Organized according to Kentucky geography, with one passage for each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties, On Homesickness examines whether we can ever return to the places we’ve called home.