Adams, Alice | Lee Upton (essay date 1989)
Lee Upton (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Changing the Past: Alice Adams' Revisionary Nostalgia," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 33-41.
[In the following essay, Upton analyzes the function of nostalgia in Adams's short stories.]
Alice Adams extends upon and recasts our definitions of nostalgia. Dispossessed, the female characters in her short fiction turn to their memories as their most volatile, and promising, possessions. These women rechart their lives, actually returning—imaginatively and, more often than not, physically—to past landscapes. This hunger for retrospectives emerges as a peculiar form of nostalgia. Nostalgia, with its semantic reference to homesickness and its root in the Greek nostos ("return home") and algos ("pain"), becomes a revisionary impulse. As Adams' narrator of the title story of Return Trips has been told by "a very wise woman":...
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