A Taste of Nostalgia: Children's Books from the Golden Age-Carroll, Grahame, and Milne

This essay interrogates nostalgia along pathological lines by attending to its medical origins and following its migration into psychoanalysis, empire and children's literature. It demonstrates how nostalgia, in its particularly sensory embodiment, works in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, and Winnie-the-Pooh to cover over aspects of childhood distasteful to adult sensibilities—with only partial success.