title: Encroaching Pasts, Uncertain Futures
title: Nostalgia, Identity and Fear in Contemporary American Women’s Speculative Fiction
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Wagstaffe, Sarah
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024
Subjects: speculative fiction
politics
gender
contemporary america
nostalgia
women's writing
21st century

description: 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.