Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror : The Melancholic Sublime

In exploring contemporary culture, this book touches on the role of architecture to provoke feelings of sublimity, the role of art in the aftermath of destructive events, literature’s place as an establisher of the historical moment as a point of sublime transformation and change, and the place of nostalgia and the returning of past practices in digital culture from gaming to popular cinema.

This book re-examines the role of the sublime across a range of disparate cultural texts, from architecture and art, to literature, digital technology, and film, detailing a worrying trend towards nostalgia and arguing that, although the sublime has the potential to be the most powerful uniting aesthetic force, it currently spreads fear, violence, and retrospection. In exploring contemporary culture, this book touches on the role of architecture to provoke feelings of sublimity, the role of art in the aftermath of destructive events, literature’s establishment of the historical moment as a point of sublime transformation and change, and the place of nostalgia and the returning of past practices in digital culture from gaming to popular cinema.