Filtered nostalgia of the 1920s: representations of the British university ideal

Abstract

Universities may be a place of personal development where intellectual, social and spiritual growth can occur in an environment that offers social mobility, but they are also the site of idealised fictions of nostalgia. There is a practice of reinterpreting nostalgia of the British (and in particular the English) university world for a modern audience and this fictionalised English university ideal provides an instantly recognised model. Our paper will interrogate sources of this manufactured image, beginning with that defining representation of the English university of the 1920s which appears in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.