Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War

The concept of "home" is explored in various literary and cultural sources, with the ancient Greek word "nostos" being particularly powerful. Homer's Odysseus is a famous example of someone who longs for his native home, Ithaca. This idea of nostos and nostalgia has been invoked by writers and filmmakers across different times and genres, and Ithaca serves as an evocative abstraction that represents possibility, the past, longing, memory, sleep, and forgetting. Imagining Ithaca explores this concept through a diverse range of sources, including literature, memoirs, and fantasy, spanning from the end of World War I to the present day.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 01 April 2021
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one, said Charles Dickens, stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in the strongest conjuration. The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as a teeming word... a haunted word... a word to conjure with. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer's Odysseus, who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures, and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while, he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (His native home deep imagined in his soul, as Pope's translation has it). From Virgil's Aeneid to James Joyce's Ulysses, from MGM's The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott's Omeros to Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, Ithaca has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, a sleep, and a forgetting. In essence, it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney's Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

Weight: 600g
Dimension: 147 x 224 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198852971