Nostalgic fetish and the English Heimat: Timetraveling adventures in the transatlantic gilded age
Abstract
Hunger for legitimacy based on glories of an idyllic (and fast-receding) past is nothing new. In the final third of the nineteenth century, the works of American artists Edwin Austin Abbey, Frank Millet, and George Henry Boughton reflected an engagement with the historical past that moved beyond memory to fantasy. In so doing, these images reveal the palimpsestic nature of American identity in the transatlantic gilded age. In order to target the constructs of memory and identity, this article includes relevant contextual information for the American artists and genre images in question. The bulk of the article focuses on genre and narrative scenes by Abbey and Boughton set in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England and the American Colonies, respectively. While an anachronistic scene might be out of reach of personal memory, setting the scene in a recent past could place it within access of collective memory. By de-formalizing the past, the artist renders that past moment more accessible to his intended audience. From subject matter and style to reception, these images demonstrate an important facet of contemporary American identity, even as it has become increasingly self-reflexive: nostalgia for an imagined, possibly fantastical, history that legitimates our present.
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