Once and Future Golden Ages: Literary Nostalgia in Fin de Siècle Canada.

While significant differences separate modernist and fin-de-siècle assessments of nostalgia in Canada, intellectuals from both periods associate longing for a lost past with the absolute. This essay examines Northrop Frye's idea of nostalgia in relation to that of two late Victorians, the idealist philosopher John Watson and the writer Agnes Maule Machar, to suggest that the distinction between the two treatments of nostalgia lies in their authors' disparate views of the absolute's relationship to history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]