Overview

In The Art of Looking Back, Maggie McKinley evaluates the complex nature of nostalgia in the canon of Joan Didion, a theme that has often been taken for granted, oversimplified, and misunderstood. In reassessing this fraught concept, McKinley emphasizes the productive rather than regressive or escapist qualities of nostalgia in Didion's work, highlighting its role as a critical tool used to dissect cultural myths and understand individual identity. McKinley's contextualized analysis offers a nuanced understanding of Didion's views of American history, national rhetoric, hubris, gender politics, grief and loss, and more, underscoring why Didion's writing remains deeply relevant as a cultural touchstone in the twenty-first century.

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9780807186091

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Reviews

""This brilliant study lays bare Joan Didion's wavering yet insistent wrestling with nostalgia, American style, over more than sixty years. Maggie McKinley's incisive but subtle cross-examination of the pervasive wistfulness that suffuses Didion's fiction and nonfiction will stand as definitive."" - J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life ""No one else has used nostalgia theory so thoroughly and convincingly as a critical tool to enhance our understanding of Didion's life and work. To date, this book is the clearest articulation of Didion's prescience—of the ways, now more than ever, that our national myths serve the powerful, even as those myths (denying history and infantilizing the public) have such great impact on the lives, deaths, and difficult circumstances of others."" - Robert J. Begiebing, author of Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations ""McKinley's book is essential reading not just for Didion scholars but also for those interested in how memory studies offers a means of navigating the uncertain, constantly shifting terrain of longing in the modern imagination."" - Brian Cremins, author of Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia ""McKinley's examination of nostalgia as literary theme and sociohistorical concept resonates clearly with questions that plague the political present, helping reveal the enduring importance of reading Didion in our times."" - Andy Connolly, author of Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Author Information

Maggie McKinley is professor of English at Harper College. She is the author of Understanding Norman Mailer and Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–75, and the editor of Norman Mailer in Context and Philip Roth in Context.

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