Essays on Nostalgia

The lyrics of the 2009 hit single “Fireflies” by Owl City offer a glimpse of symbolic storytelling that incorporates the metaphor of fire to describe vivid emotions experienced by the singer. “Fireflies” repeated refers to the glowing lights emitted by Lampyridae species of insect, but...

The pair of characters, Jim and Ántonia, in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia, help to suggest the overarching theme in Cather’s literature: nostalgia. As the reader navigates Cather’s other novels like The Professor’s House, The Song of the Lark, or O! Pioneers, one would...

“The Island” by Grace Nicholas, is a poem that is centred on a man visualising the memories of an island. It isn’t clearly said what this island was to him, but whether it was his past residence or a trip he went to, the waves...

Humans are predisposed to resist change, but, regardless of that fact, our world is rapidly changing and recent generations have borne the brunt of it. This makes them all the more susceptible to nostalgia. With the rise of technological advancements and inescapable political turmoil, they...

Christmas is used to be my favorite holiday. It is a time where we have family gatherings with bunch of food around a house full of Christmas ornaments. There are lots of reasons why I love Christmas but as I look around, it is not...

Escapism is a common theme in art history in which artists depict events or activities that offer an escape from the woes of life. Artists have always found it useful to represent joyful activities in their works of art. The depictions created, avail momentary amusement...

From an evolutionary perspective, we all come from different environments and genetic combinations. These factors, along with many others, influence the development of humans. Life History Theory categorizes two different life strategies between slow and fast lifestyles. To distinguish one another, fast life strategists derive...

Insight into the past is now more accessible than ever at the touch of a button. This enables a mass audience to accumulate and idealize the past they have not seen; a memory in which is not theirs. People can reminisce and romanticize about the...

Postmodern literature is a form of literature emerged in the post-World War II era which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and...

The Partition was traumatic to those people who have faced physical violence, humiliation and sexual assault who were compelled to leave their homeland. Recollections are objects that unforeseen tumble from the mind and connect the present to the past. From the narratives of the past...