Linda M. Austin

author of Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917

November 4, 2015

Linda Austin holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and specializes in the British literature and culture of the "long" nineteenth century (1780-1917). She is the author of The Practical Ruskin (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) and Nostalgia in Transition (U of Virginia P, 2007), as well as essays on Thomas Hardy, James Thomson, John Ruskin, Alice Meynell and other writers. Her interests cover the relations between literature and the fine arts, nineteenth-century economics and mental science. She has been at OSU since 1986.

In Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917, Linda M. Austin traces the development of nostalgia from a memory disorder in the eighteenth century to its modern formulation as a pleasant recreational distraction. Offering a paradigm for and analysis of nostalgic memory as it operates in various attempts to reenact the past, Austin explains both the early and the modern understanding of this phenomenon. For students and scholars interested in the Victorian era as well as in Romanticism and modernism, Nostalgia in Transition provides a well-rounded perspective on how and why our understanding of nostalgia has changed over time.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2008-honorees/linda-austin

Last Updated: 14 January 2022