“Our flame, the will-o’-the-wisp that dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade” – Modern Literary Nostalgia as Death Mood

Abstrakt

This article argues that there is a difference between nostalgic emotion and nostalgic mood and that the latter one often is a result of nostalgia’s inevitable link to death, entropy and teleology. It examines how nostalgic tropes, such as ruins, childhood, youth, astronomical representations, and subjective time (duration), inherited from the romantic poetry function as, and create, nostalgic death moods and retardations of eschatology in modernist fiction.