In Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–1917, Linda M. Austin charts the transition of the term “nostalgia” from its eighteenth-century usage, when it denoted a pathological homesickness, to its modern sense of pining for a romanticized past. Revising our own prejudices about memory is key to understanding this shift; accordingly, Austin links the development of nostalgia to nineteenth-century models that located memory in the body's neurosensory functions. Memory in these models became a physiological act associated with habit and repetition rather than a mental act of cognition and recall. By placing nostalgia within this tradition of physiological memory, Austin demonstrates that in its transition from pathology to cultural aesthetic, nostalgia “became a sensory-motor habit with communal appeal” (22). This physical, communal nature leads Austin to conclude that nostalgia, a form of remembering that permeates Victorian culture, “defied the forces of high modernism” by refusing to concede to the high/low culture divide produced by a post-Freudian model of memory that privileges the mental activity of recalling the past (199).

Austin divides the book into two sections, the first exploring personal uses of nostalgia and the second considering nostalgia's role in public memory. In chapter 1, she reads Emily Brontë's poetry as a self-contained microcosm of nostalgia's transition from illness to aesthetic. Austin argues that in a sequence of four poems, Brontë presents homesickness as a troublesome malady before resolving that malady through an aesthetic response in which longing for her specific home at Haworth Cottage is satisfied by memories of a nonspecific, generic home. Chapter 2 offers a treatment of three elegies—Matthew Arnold's “Thyrsis,” Alfred Lord Tennyson's “‘Frater Ave Atque Vale,’” and Thomas Hardy's “Under the Waterfall.” In these three poems, Austin charts a gradual but pronounced separation of nostalgia from grief and mourning. Beginning with Arnold and concluding with Hardy, nostalgia is normalized and increasingly becomes a pleasurable, aesthetic response that replaces the grief of mourning. With these first two chapters, Austin shows how nostalgia changed through the century, laying an important foundation for the second part of her book.

The second part of Nostalgia in Transition explores nostalgia as a form of communal memory that runs counter to prevailing standards of taste. Nostalgia, because it is a physiological form of memory that does not appeal to an empirically verifiable past, offends the post-Kantian aesthetic that values as beautiful that which is “free and reflective” (86). This public nostalgia manifests itself in two forms: in productions of childhood (chap. 3) and in the transformation of the picturesque cottage into a national icon (chap. 4). Although these subjects seem unrelated at first glance, the connections that Austin draws between them illuminate brilliantly two functions of communal nostalgia. First, because, as Austin shows, both childhood and the cottage are unstable categories, they can be known only through generic, composite images that are pieced together from numerous, specific instances. In this respect, Austin negotiates a large body of theoretical work on collective memory to show in very tangible terms how Victorians remembered collectively. Second, Austin convincingly shows that patterns of consumption can, in and of themselves, be instances of collective nostalgia. In the case of childhood, possession of the composite image produced in the illustrations of artists like Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham allowed the viewer to create a unified sense of self not through empirically verifiable recall but through physiological contact. In the case of cottages, public nostalgia (which made the cottage a commodity through which the public could experience the past) joined with historiography (a mentalistic form of memory that made the cottage a repository of preindustrial labor) to make the cottage suitable for the modern economy by fashioning it into a single icon of English national identity in which we see the “convergence of heritage and enterprise” (153).

The final chapter of Nostalgia in Tradition returns to Thomas Hardy, showing how personal and public nostalgia converge in his career. In her discussion of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Austin maps out Hardy's growing suspicion of nostalgia as a legitimate means of sustaining the community of Casterbridge; she then turns to his integration of nostalgia into a poetics of remembrance in his later verse, arguing that in Hardy's poetry, we see that the pleasure of nostalgia could substitute for personal recollection. This chapter registers both Hardy's ambivalence toward nostalgia and the larger problems attendant on nostalgia in the twentieth century—the contempt heaped upon it as a form of false remembering and the pleasure derived from that memory. Literary scholars will find this chapter to be the most useful of the book, for Austin offers an extended reading of the complexities of Hardy's work that goes into more depth than her necessarily briefer discussions of Brontë, Arnold, and Tennyson.

The ambitious scope of Nostalgia in Tradition is at once the book's greatest limitation and its greatest strength. Particularly in the first part of the book, Austin relies on thorough, detailed readings of a few, relatively minor texts to accomplish the work of showing “the broad appeal and common operation of nostalgia in nineteenth-century culture” (23). The first two chapters discuss seven poems, only one of which (“Thyrsis”) can be considered a major work within its author's oeuvre. Consequently, I found myself wishing throughout that Austin had time to direct her insight toward other works and cultural events that seem to participate in (if not fully to embody) the nostalgia that she describes: among others, Keats's “Nightingale” ode, with its desire for an endlessly reproducible song of no fixed origin; the Oxford Movement, with its emphasis on habit, ritual, and performance; and the travel narratives of the period, many of which express the nostalgia for home in which Austin's study is grounded. In retrospect, however, the absences that I felt reading the book validate Austin's most important insight—that our own privileging of mental memory has obscured our understanding of nostalgia. Literary scholars, historians, and students of Victorian culture will find that Nostalgia in Transition inspires them to reconsider texts, events, and cultural practices that the book leaves unmentioned. The importance of Austin's masterful study thus lies not in its treatment of individual manifestations of nostalgia (though these are indeed remarkable) but in its suggestive power of a much wider application.