Nostalgia

This thesis takes a cultural studies approach to representations of post-war U.S.
suburbia in Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, as well as in the
contemporary AMC television series Mad Men. These texts explore the postwar time
period, which holds a persistently prominent and idealized space in the collective cultural
imagination of America, despite the fact that it was a period troubled by isolationism,
containment culture, rampant consumerism, and extreme pressure to conform to social
roles. This project disrupts the romantic narrative of postwar America by focusing on the
latent anxiety within the suburban landscape—by interrogating the performative nature of
the planned communities of the 1950s and 1960s and exposing the tensions that were
borne out of the rise of domesticity and consumerism. This project explores the descent
into a society obsessed with consumerism and conformity, and seeks to interrogate the
culture’s false nostalgia for the time period.

A 'wave of nostalgia' has gripped the US leading to nostalgic fashions, furniture, television programming and even food. The marketing literature suggests that nostalgic-related consumption is the result of an aging population. It has been proposed that the purchase of nostalgic-products and services is an attempt by mature consumers to return psychologically to the ease, certainties and conflict free periods that existed or seemed to exist during their childhood or adolescence. This paper proposes that discontinuity, as argued by Davis (1979), is a better explanation for why people develop a preference for and consume nostalgic goods. Although some insights have been developed, research focused only on mature consumers and is rather limited in offering alternative explanations for the evocation of nostalgic feelings. MANCOVA was the primary method used to test hypotheses. Findings of this study indicate that discontinuity does not necessarily lead to nostalgia and preference for nostalgic products varies.