노스탤지어와 20세기말의 미국 아동/청소년문학

Nostalgia and the American Children’s Literature of 1990s: Richard Peck’s A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago

The pathos of nostalgia detected in Richard Peck’s Newbery winners, A Long Way from Chicago (1997) and A Year Down Yonder (2000) is not only the author’s personal yearning for the lost childhood. It can also be interpreted as a social symptom of anxiety and desire of the 1990s, another fin de siecle of the twentieth century. The grandmother of the 1930s portrayed at the center of the two novels is a fictional character, onto whom the age of 1990s projects its own need and desire. Grandmother’s spirit of nonconformity, thoughtfulness, and sense of criticism of her times perfected through nostalgia could be the incarnation of the values another age of economic crisis of the 1990s had been pursuing. In this context, nostalgia, even if it is retrospective and even regressive, can still work as a cure for the loss of childhood and locality in the postmodern world.