The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

Exploring the creative dimensions of memory and remembering, Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering tackle some of the key questions facing the emergent field of memory studies, including the nature of the relationship between memory and experience and between individual and collective memory. The most crucial relationship examined is one which has previously been largely ignored: the relationship between memory and imagination. The book argues for the importance of bringing imagination into the purview of memory studies and introduces the key concept of the mnemonic imagination as a tool for demonstrating the mutual interaction of memory and imagination in our everyday practices and processes of making sense of experience. Showing how the mnemonic imagination works in various aspects of personal life and popular culture, the authors address diverse topics such as the commercial exploitation of nostalgia and the remembering of traumatic and painful pasts.