This concluding chapter revisits the tour guides discussed in Chapter 4 and explores how they were instructed by representatives of the state to include the term xiangchou into their scripts. The repetition of xiangchou within the old heritage site illustrates the salience of the term, its cultural resonance, as well as its political influence. However, the tour guides’ personal interpretations of xiangchou also demonstrates the way the state’s appropriation of the term had created new forms of alienation: some Heyang locals feel homesick for a hometown they once knew and seems no longer to be. A divide has emerged between the xiangchou that drew urban tourists to Heyang, the xiangchou that locals hold for the Heyang of their childhood, the xiangchou expressed as a form of concern for the future of their hometown, and the xiangchou that the state invoked to implement its policy objectives upon the village.

This methodological introduction outlines definitions of both the modernist epic and of nostalgia. In particular, it introduces the concept of “archaeological nostalgia,” the longing for the past of a place one already inhabits. This new categorization of nostalgia proves key to understanding the emotion’s role in modernist poetics. Existing scholarly debates surrounding the nature of nostalgia are also surveyed to demonstrate its political significance, and a “weak theory” of modernist epic as a capacious genre is offered.

This chapter considers James Joyce’s paradigmatic modernist epic, Ulysses (1922), reading its meticulous reconstruction of 1904 Dublin as a nostalgic return to the author’s homeland and childhood. While scholars have recently recognized the role of nostalgia in Joyce’s work, they have overlooked its significance to the form and content of Ulysses. The text privileges personal experience of a place and culture over linear ideas of national heritage; in so doing, it disrupts xenophobic accounts of Irish identity founded on racial purity. Its juxtaposition of everyday experience with ancient epic sidesteps an exclusionary idea of heritage while retaining the literary resonance of mythic parallels. In other words, it rejects an unhealthy obsession with the past through its use of nostalgia.

This conclusion explores whether nostalgia can exist in postcolonial literatures, burdened as they are by traumatic histories of imperial oppression, by examining the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s variation on Homeric epic, Omeros. Is nostalgia no longer relevant when a culture’s past is cut off by violence and the lost homeland cannot be restored? Or can longing for the irrecoverable past be part of a creative response to problematic histories? This inquiry crystalizes a central aim of the project: to show how nostalgia can be a means of reimagining the national past, an inclusive way of expressing commitment to a particular culture.

Chapter 6 examines another group of ‘returnees’ in Heyang: young entrepreneurs with various backgrounds of urban socialization. They represent a generation of youth caught in the crosshairs of institutionalized competition, an achievement-complex, mounting youth unemployment, and a pervasive experience of ‘involution.’ Through the social category of fanxiangqingnian, “return youth,” this chapter examines how xiangchou becomes a mobilizing discourse that can encourage return from the standpoint of individual choice and desire, and how it helps reshape the overall discourse surrounding the countryside as both a place and ‘lifestyle’ considered as desirable to return to. Xiangchou becomes a language of ‘escape’ and a materialized reality where one can seemingly ‘escape to’. However, the experience of the young entrepreneurs in Heyang also underscore the complexities of this ‘return’ in the forms of the limitations, challenges, and dilemmas that they encounter in the village.

Chapter 4, on David Jones’ The Anathemata (1952), considers the poem in terms of the author’s own aspiration to preserve the past. Jones considers art to be a way of making its object present and active, as the Roman Catholic Mass is believed to make Christ’s body and blood present. This form of “re-presentation” (anamnēsis) makes the past actively present without literally reconstructing it, offering a middle way between Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. In Jones’ view, poets in the twentieth century must assemble the fragments of the cultural past as a means of resisting the increasingly utilitarian nature of modern culture. Ultimately, Jones’ densely allusive poetry forces us to consider the limits of nostalgia. If art inevitably makes past present, is it always in some sense nostalgic?

Chapter 3 considers T. S. Eliot and Lynette Roberts together as authors who develop major long poems in response to the violence and mechanization of World War II. While Eliot and Roberts carried on significant correspondence during this period, almost nothing has been written about the relationship between their poetry. In the face of wartime desolation, both offer fragmentary images of a submerged national past: the spiritual sanctuary of Little Gidding for Eliot; the buried dragon of the Welsh nation for Roberts. Alongside these images of potential national revival, both consider the possibility of transcendence, while still identifying with the political disarray of their chosen nations.

This chapter introduces the central contextual and theoretical framework of this book. It provides a historical overview of the PRC’s development from the Mao era to the present, highlighting the formation and intensification of the urban-rural divide during a condensed period of urban-biased modernization. It then discusses how xiangchou is used and understood in this book within this developmental context as both a ‘structure of feeling’ and a form of affective governance. Literary and cultural analysis demonstrates how xiangchou can be understood akin to the nostalgic structure of feeling, whereas a discursive analysis of the term’s use in both state and academic discourses since the mid-2000s demonstrates its salience as both an emotionally affective and politically effective term. The language of xiangchou can blur the distinction between public and private desires, local and national imperatives, highlighting nodes of intersection between statecraft and the ordinary lives of citizens in villages like Heyang.

This chapter engages Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–25), which satirizes conventionally nostalgic images like childhood, courtship, and the English countryside, and is therefore usually read as anti-nostalgic. Nevertheless, Loy’s autobiographical poem returns nostalgically to moments of personal illumination experienced by the young artist and her immigrant father. These insights, into one’s inner nature and into the depths of the cosmos, ground the poem’s cultural critique. Like Joyce, Loy complicates the notion of national heritage, demanding that readers re-evaluate what it means to be English, even as she weaves nostalgia into a poem largely negative towards the past.

This chapter begins with the description of Australian poets as expatriates from the beginning of settlement. It argues that a perceived colonial provincialism and the smallness of the Australian market led to several well-known novelists pursuing their career abroad. The reasons for poets leaving Australia have been far more varied. Australian expatriate poets have been both short-term and long-term inhabitants of countries such as Paraguay (Mary Gilmore), England (W. J. Turner, Peter Porter, Clive James, Katherine Gallagher) and the United States (E. G. Moll, Keith Harrison, Ray Matthew, Kevin Roberts, Gail Holst-Warhaft). The chapter considers the influence of music on Porter’s poetry and his poetic meditations on death. It discusses the pursuit of an academic career by Harrison and his writing of particular locations and family relationships. Relatedly, it considers Gallagher’s remembrance of Australia and exploration of family and regeneration through the garden and its flowers. The chapter also appraises the erudition of James and his tribute and critiques of fellow poets. Lastly, the chapter charts the demise of the need for expatriatism in light of advances in travel and digital communication, while outlining the existence of a contemporary diaspora of Australian poets in many countries.

This chapter traces early migration from Europe during the Gold Rush and the change from multiculturalism to monoculturalism with the advent of the White Australia policy. However, it focuses primarily on first-generation migrant writers from Europe following World War II. The chapter argues that migration should be viewed through the lens of heterogeneity, shaped by geographic, cultural, linguistic and class disparities. The chapter discusses how first-generation migrants existed as ethnic minorities who often experienced hostility and were directed towards manual employment. It examines the emergence of ethnically specific periodicals, following by literary journals, literary and cultural associations, poetry collections, and anthologies. The chapter identifies a predominant theme of nostalgia, with related elements of loss and hope. Another identified theme is social justice, including empathy for the impact of displacement felt by Aboriginal peoples and a support of Aboriginal sovereignty.

This chapter introduces the discussion of the ineluctable obsolescing of the technological apparatus of theatre. Opening with a discussion of the representation of technological and human obsolescence in Star Trek, this chapter repositions the work of media archaeology, which typically excludes theatre from its purview. And yet, in its attention to the operational dimension of lost, dead, or passing technological instruments, media archaeology locates a network of inquiry profitably directed toward theatre. In a reading of the work of Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Rebecca Schneider, and others, this chapter introduces the ways apparatus, nostalgia, and obsolescence provide a lens for thinking contemporary theatre.

This chapter sees Edgar in peak career, a seasoned director and company secretary, but with continuing financial anxieties and resentments against his employer as he approached retirement. His last two years in Baghdad, in company with Winifred, illustrate the close relationship of the British imperial administration with Middle East shipping companies, and Edgar’s role in both. Winifred fostered the development of the Baghdad Anglican church, mainly for expatriates, and missionary activity, extending her St Albans church work. For Edgar, as for Winifred, their subsequent decade in the 1930s in St Albans before retirement offers a case study in expatriate transition to life at ‘home’, to domesticity and engagement in public life and local society, along with lingering Persian associations and nostalgia for their expatriate past. While expatriate service succeeded in cementing their class transformation, they remained vulnerable to middle-class economic austerity which characterised peacetime 1930s and wartime 1940s. The Wilsons’ longed-for stable settlement in England contrasted with the adoption of expatriate careers by all their children, with daughters as overseas missionaries and sons as overseas mining engineers, a tension between the continuation and rejection of expatriate mobility concluded in the next chapter.