Encroaching Pasts, Uncertain Futures : Nostalgia, Identity and Fear in Contemporary American Women’s Speculative Fiction

Wagstaffe, Sarah and Tate, Andrew (2024) Encroaching Pasts, Uncertain Futures : Nostalgia, Identity and Fear in Contemporary American Women’s Speculative Fiction. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (Complete Sarah Wagstaffe PhD Thesis December 2023 Final)
Complete_Sarah_Wagstaffe_PhD_Thesis_December_2023_Final.docx - Published Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 12 August 2029.
Download (823kB)

Abstract

This thesis argues that the impact of nostalgia on socio-political commentary in twenty-first century speculative fiction by female authors is vital to their critique of contemporary culture. Nostalgia is a powerful phenomenon that Svetlana Boym (2003) divides into two distinct categories: ‘Restorative nostalgia’ and ‘Reflective nostalgia’. This thesis contributes to the critical conversation surrounding nostalgia by expanding upon Boym’s categorisation and suggesting novel distinctions to further clarify nostalgia and its effects, particularly how it manifests in female-authored speculative works written between 2010 and 2021. This is a period which saw female autonomy under particular scrutiny, especially in the United States of America. The thesis focuses on seven novels: chapter one examines Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) and Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M (2018) to provide foundational understanding of nostalgia and its relationship to contemporary speculative fiction, chapter two analyses Kim Liggett’s The Grace Year (2019) and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters (2017) to establish a link between nostalgia and extreme right-wing political practises, chapter three draws on Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Who Fears Death (2010) as well as Christina Dalcher’s Vox (2018) to demonstrate the variety of the female lived experience in relation to nostalgia, and chapter four uses Niomi Alderman’s The Power (2017) and Christina Dalcher’s Femlandia (2021) to explore the use or rejection of nostalgia in speculative worlds with inverted power structures. Throughout the thesis I identify six subcategories of nostalgia to be considered alongside Boym’s established binary: ‘displaced nostalgia’, which occurs when people abruptly experience irreversible change; ‘generational nostalgia’, which focuses on the phenomenon of nostalgic ideals being passed on through generations; ‘isolationist nostalgia’, in which nostalgia is used as political leverage to enforce the closure of communities to outside influence; ‘nostalgia of remorse’, which combines reflective and restorative nostalgia into a contradictory hybrid; ‘nostalgia of fantasy’, another hybrid which seeks to re-establish an entirely fabricated lost past; and finally, ‘inverted nostalgia’, which can be either restorative or reflective depending on how it is employed. Drawing on such contemporary critics as John J. Su (2005), Kristen Kobes Du Mez (2020), Kimberlé Crenshaw (1995), Judith Butler (1990, 2004) and James Berger (1999), alongside foundational thinkers such as Sigmund Freud (1914-1931) and bell hooks (1982), this thesis expands the critical perception of nostalgia and highlights new perspectives on its influence on contemporary socio-political thought. This thesis also highlights speculative fiction by female authors as a powerful vector for understanding not only nostalgia itself, but its impact on specific populations and social movements.