Nostalgia and Popular Culture Symposium

“Nostalgia is always complicated — complicated in what it looks like, how it works, upon whom it works, and even who works on it.” (Sean Scanlan 2004, p.3)

Nostalgia is a pervasive force across cultures and societies, both as a comforting refuge and a site of ideological contestation. This pervasiveness certainly seems to point to William’s Faulkner’s oft-quoted idea, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Nostalgia is far from simply an evocation of the past, though. It is a complex phenomenon that influences contemporary narrative and the construction of collective identity. As Sean Scanlan writes, “nostalgia is always complicated— complicated in what it looks like, how it works, upon whom it works, and even who works on it” (3). While nostalgia may often be understood as a reflection of the past (even in untruthful, misconstrued terms), it also “occupies the liminal ground between history qua history and the procedures of memory” (Scanlan, 4), drawing particular attention to the interconnectedness – and fallibility – of history, memory and feeling. 

Nostalgia Studies is by no means new but has perhaps received renewed attention in recent years. It is especially difficult to ignore the significance of nostalgia in relation to recent global events, such as the impact of the “comfort film/show/book” on people’s experiences of COVID-19 lockdowns and the role of nostalgia narratives in the rise of the far right. In this context, nostalgia significantly “constitutes a response to contemporary frustrations, anxieties, or inadequacies that induces perceptions of a halcyon past—real or imagined” (Springman, np). Considering how and why nostalgia is used and represented in popular texts and cultures is therefore vital, as it reveals the underlying dynamics of power, resistance, and ideological formation.  

Co-hosted by Deakin’s Reading Writing Futures and the Reading and Screening the Fantastique Research Network, this one-day symposium will facilitate robust discussions on the role of nostalgia in the production and reception of popular cultures. Spanning disciplines, forms and genres, the symposium schedule will include keynote speakers A/Prof Amy Burge, University of Birmingham and Dr Jodi McAlister, Deakin University and a range of panels addressing pressing questions in this space, encouraging participants to think beyond clear-cut conceptions of nostalgia and towards more nuanced understandings of it as simultaneously limiting, comforting, provocative and powerful in the context of popular culture. 

Keynote abstract:

Unlacing the Bonkbuster: Reading Then, Reading Now

Amy Burge and Jodi McAlister

The bonkbuster – an explosively popular genre of women’s writing in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – is currently having an interesting resurgence. Simon & Schuster have mounted a large-scale republishing project for Jackie Collins’ novels. Jilly Cooper and Shirley Conran were both awarded damehoods in the last couple of years. Cooper in particular has re-emerged into the public eye, with then-UK PM Rishi Sunak naming her his favourite author in 2023, a few months prior to the publication of her novel Tackle!; and, even more recently, the star-studded adaptation of her 1988 novel Rivals, which started streaming on Disney+ in October.

The bonkbuster is a genre many people hold close to their heart and reflect very nostalgically on, while acknowledging many of its more problematic elements. In 2022-23, we conducted focus groups with people who were reading bonkbusters in the 1980s and 1990s, where we garnered many of these reflections – some on the genre as a whole, some on specific texts. To explore these ideas further, we also held two “bonkbuster book clubs” in 2024: one focusing on Lace by Shirley Conran, and one on Rivals by Jilly Cooper.

In this keynote, we will explore the appeal of the bonkbuster then and now, using insights from the readers we’ve talked to think through how they approached and understood bonkbusters at the time of their original reading versus the way they approach them now. In particular, we will focus on some of the lessons our participants took away from bonkbusters as young people – lessons about sex, feminism, and being a woman in the world – and how they reflect on them now as adults. By doing so, we will seek to identify why this genre is making something of a comeback: is it just nostalgia, or is there more at work here?

Biographical notes

Dr Amy Burge is Associate Professor in Popular Fiction at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance (Palgrave 2016), and Managing Editor of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies.

Dr Jodi McAlister is Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University. She is the author of The Consummate Virgin: Female Virginity Loss and Love in Anglophone Popular Literatures (Palgrave 2020) and New Adult Fiction (Cambridge UP 2021), and Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. She is also an author of romance fiction: her most recent novel is Not Here To Make Friends (Simon & Schuster 2024).

Dr Burge and Dr McAlister are under contract for a monograph on the bonkbuster, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. 

Works cited:

Scanlan, Sean. “Introduction: Nostalgia.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3-9.

Springman, Luke. “Propaganda and Nostalgia: Constructing Memories about the German Democratic Republic for Young People.” Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys, and Contemporary Media Culture, edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, Routledge, 2017, np.