BOOK REVIEW
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, edited by Tobias Becker, Dylan Trigg, Routledge (2024), 592 Pages, £184.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-032-42920-5
The handbook opens with an image that feels strangely familiar. A soldier far from home, weakened not by wounds but by longing, begins to fade. In early medical writing, nostalgia was not a metaphor but a diagnosis, sometimes fatal. The editors return to this forgotten scene to remind readers that nostalgia once carried the weight of illness before it became a shared cultural language. This anecdote does more than offer historical colour. It sets up the central tension that runs through the handbook. Is nostalgia a weakness that pulls people backward, or is it a resource that helps them survive disruption? As the chapters unfold, the book refuses easy answers. Instead, it shows nostalgia as an emotion that moves between care and danger, comfort and distortion, private memory and public power. The reader is drawn in not because the past feels warm, but because the present feels unstable, and nostalgia keeps appearing where certainty fails.
The volume is edited by Tobias Becker and Dylan Trigg, two scholars whose work makes them well placed to shape a handbook of this scope. Becker is a historian of modern Europe and popular culture, currently a Visiting Professor of Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin. His recent book Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia has already become a key reference in the field. Trigg is a philosopher based at the University of Vienna, known for his work on phenomenology, emotion, and embodied experience. His earlier studies of anxiety, atmosphere, and place bring a careful sensitivity to lived feeling. Together, they combine historical depth with philosophical rigor. Their affiliations and publication records justify their authority, but more importantly, their editorial voice remains restrained. They do not impose a single theory. They allow contradiction to stand. This choice shapes the entire handbook.
At its core, The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia offers a broad and careful map of what has come to be called nostalgia studies. The editors frame nostalgia not as one thing but as a shifting set of meanings that change across time, culture, and discipline. The handbook makes clear that nostalgia has moved from medicine to metaphor, from private longing to public strategy. Across forty-five chapters, contributors show how nostalgia appears in psychology experiments, political movements, media industries, and everyday objects. Arguments are laid out patiently. Chapters tend to begin with disciplinary background before moving to contemporary debates. This makes the volume accessible to readers who may be new to the field while still offering depth for specialists. Rather than pushing toward synthesis, the book accepts that nostalgia resists neat closure.
One of the handbook’s strongest contributions is its refusal to treat nostalgia as merely sentimental or false. Many earlier critiques dismissed nostalgia as denial or escape. Here, that view is challenged without being erased. Psychological research presented in the volume shows nostalgia as a coping mechanism that can restore meaning, social connection, and self-continuity. At the same time, historical and political chapters show how nostalgia can harden into exclusion or myth. By holding these positions together, the editors shift the field away from moral judgment and toward careful analysis. Nostalgia is shown as neither cure nor poison, but as a force that depends on context. This balanced approach marks a significant step forward in nostalgia research.
At moments, the handbook does take positions that may unsettle readers trained in more critical traditions. The positive framing of nostalgia in psychology, especially its link to wellbeing, stands in tension with long standing suspicions in cultural theory. Some contributors argue that nostalgia can support resilience and ethical reflection. Others worry that these risks normalizing a feeling that has been weaponized in nationalist politics. This tension is not resolved, and that is a strength rather than a weakness. The handbook stages a debate instead of smoothing it over. Readers are invited to sit with discomfort and to recognize that nostalgia’s effects cannot be predicted in advance.
Healthy debate runs throughout the volume. Chapters on populism, white supremacy, and colonial memory challenge the celebratory tone found elsewhere. The discussion of Afro-nostalgia and queer-nostalgia complicates the idea that longing for the past always supports dominant power. These chapters show nostalgia as a way marginalized groups reclaim erased histories or imagine different futures. The book does not ask readers to choose which version is correct. Instead, it suggests that nostalgia is shaped by who remembers, what is remembered, and for what purpose. This framing opens space for productive disagreement across disciplines.
Structurally, the handbook is organized into five sections comprising forty-five chapters. The first section focuses on disciplinary approaches, beginning with philosophy and moving through sociology, history, psychology, literature, semiotics, music, heritage studies, and media studies. This opening establishes the many lenses through which nostalgia can be studied. The second section shifts to key concepts such as time, affect, memory, wellbeing, childhood, ageing, and environmental loss. Here the focus narrows from disciplines to the building blocks of nostalgic experience. The third section turns to history and politics, examining nostalgia in relation to nationalism, feminism, race, class, and post socialist societies. The fourth section explores space, materiality, and practices, including ruins, appliances, keepsakes, and regional identity. The final section addresses media and genre, tracing nostalgia across analogue and digital media, film reboots, gaming, comics, and diasporic cinema. The progression from abstract frameworks to concrete practices is deliberate and effective.
The handbook’s relevance extends well beyond nostalgia studies. For brand researchers, organizational scholars, and social scientists, the volume offers tools to understand how memory circulates in markets and institutions. Nostalgia appears in branding not only as retro design but as a promise of stability and trust. Chapters on media, material culture, and affect provide insight into why nostalgic cues work and when they fail. For policy makers, the political chapters offer cautionary lessons about how appeals to the past can mobilize fear as easily as hope. The book encourages readers to treat nostalgia as an infrastructure of meaning rather than a decorative style.
Ethics and social responsibility are never far from view. Several chapters show how nostalgia shapes collective memory and moral judgment. Discussions of heritage and ruins raise questions about what societies choose to preserve and what they allow to disappear. The treatment of environmental nostalgia and solastalgia connects longing for lost landscapes to climate anxiety. In branding and organizational contexts, these insights matter. Nostalgia can soften ethical scrutiny by wrapping products and institutions in emotional familiarity (Mukhopadhyay, 2024). The handbook helps readers see when nostalgia supports care and when it obscures harm.
One of the most compelling threads for organizational and marketing scholars is the treatment of nostalgia as a psychological coping mechanism rather than a disorder (Sedikides et al., 2016). Chapters on wellbeing, autobiographical memory, and childhood show how nostalgia helps individuals manage change, loss, and uncertainty. Organizational nostalgia, when handled with care, can help workers make sense of restructuring, digital transformation, or identity shifts (Leunissen et al., 2024). Nostalgia marketing, often criticized as manipulative, is reframed here as a complex emotional exchange. Anecdotes from chapters on music, media revivals, and consumer objects show how shared memories create temporary communities of feeling. These chapters argue that nostalgia does not simply pull people backward. It can help them endure transition.
Compared to peer volumes, this handbook stands out for its breadth and editorial restraint. Earlier collections often leaned heavily toward cultural critique or psychological validation (Li et al., 2025). Here, both are present, but neither dominates. The decision not to impose a single definition allows the field to appear in motion. For readers familiar with works by Svetlana Boym (2008) or Fred Davis (1979), the handbook offers expansion rather than repetition. It gathers emerging voices alongside established scholars, giving the field a sense of continuity and renewal.
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia succeeds because it takes nostalgia seriously without romanticizing it. It treats longing as a fact of modern life, shaped by acceleration, loss, and change. The editors allow nostalgia to remain unresolved, and that honesty feels right. The book will be valuable to scholars across disciplines, to brand researchers and policy thinkers, and to any reader interested in how the past is used in the present. Like the opening anecdote of the homesick soldier, it reminds us that nostalgia has always been about survival as much as memory.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Boym, S. (2008). The future of nostalgia. Basic books.
Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York, 4, 2-4.
Leunissen, J. M., Van Dijke, M., Wildschut, T., & Sedikides, C. (2024). Organizational nostalgia: The construct, the scale and its implications for organizational functioning. British Journal of Management, 35(2), 816-838.
Li, B., Ma, H., & Huo, Y. (2025). Analgesics effect of nostalgia: good memories of the past makes you feel less pain. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12(1), 1-9.
Mukhopadhyay, M. (2024). Nostalgia marketing-a systematic literature review and future directions. Journal of Marketing Communications, 1-21.
Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2016). Past forward: Nostalgia as a motivational force. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(5), 319-321.
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Reviewed by
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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