Coming Back Stronger
90s Nostalgia in Contemporary Media Culture
Coming Back Stronger
90s Nostalgia in Contemporary Media Culture
Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
Through sixteen diverse case studies, this collection examines the influence of the 1990s in contemporary film, television, and internet culture.
We live in an age of crisis: war, pandemic, political chaos, financial meltdowns, extreme inequality, and the acceleration of climate breakdown define our era. We also live in the online age of constant connection and media saturation, where our social realities are overdetermined by screens, notifications, anxieties about "fake news," and endless content on demand. In response, digital detoxes and other coping mechanisms are on the rise, and a significant amount of media content is marked by a turning away from the horrors of the future and the horrors of the present to look firmly back to the past, in ways that mobilise a range of ambivalent nostalgic modes and affects.
One of the most striking trends in 21st-century Western media culture is the rise of nostalgia for the 1990s: a period that is often characterised as the last period before social media ruined "authentic" relationships and, for many, the last hopeful period before the world started falling apart. Over the last decade, the trend of re-makes and sequels of original 90s film and television texts, reformations of dissolved 90s rock bands, and rebirths of 90s celebrity icons suggests that the 1990s serves as a crucial touchstone for thinking about our contemporary milieu. This volume examines the influence of the 1990s in contemporary screen media, problematising simple notions of sentimentality for the past, and paying close attention to both the continuities and the ruptures between the 1990s and the present day.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Neil Ewen (University of Exeter, UK), Shelley Cobb (University of Southampton, UK), Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University, UK)
Part I: Retelling the 90s
1. Revisionist Cultural Politics and Generational Interpellation in The People vs. OJ Simpson
Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University, UK)
2. Re-mediating 90s Celebrity Scandals: I, Tonya, Impeachment, and Pam and Tommy
Shelley Cobb (University of Southampton, UK)
3. Editing Together a New Past: Nostalgic Television, Mediation and Ambivalence in Quiz
Caitlin Shaw (University of Bristol, UK)
4. Teenage Dreams and Troubled Times in Derry Girls
Madison Barnes-Nelson (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
Part II: 90s Reboots
5. That 90s Show: Reboots, Netflix, and Television's Nostalgia for Itself
Dana Heller (East Michigan University, USA)
6. "Who Would Have Thought We'd Look Back with Nostalgia and Say That Was a Simpler Time?": Ambivalent Fandom, 21st-century Politics, and The X-Files Revival
Bethan Jones (University of York, UK)
7. "I Remember Her": Exploring Midlife and the Spectres of Sex and the City in And Just Like That
Deborah Jermyn (University of Roehampton, UK) and Betty Kaklamanidou (Aristotle University, Greece)
8. Gladiators, Ready! Nostalgia, Sports Entertainment, and the Classical Body on Television
Lindsay Steenberg (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Part III: Lost Futures and 90s Technostalgia
9. Where is My Mind? Capitalism, Crisis, and 90s Nostalgia in Mr. Robot
Neil Ewen (University of Exeter, UK)
10. Technostalgic Globalization in Simpsonwave
David Zeglen (University of Michigan, USA)
11. Modems, Beeps, and Dial Up: 21st-century Nostalgia for Web 1.0 and the Internet of the 90s
Aditya Deshbandhu (University of Exeter, UK)
12. "Love the Cold War Aesthetic": Constructions of Eastern Europe in American Nostalgia Television
Júlia Havas (University of York, UK)
Part IV: Generational Reckonings and the Enduring 90s
13. Long Live Luke Perry: BH90210 as Melancholic Teen Idol Reboot
Alice Leppert (Ursinus College, USA)
14. The Real World Homecoming, Generational Reckoning, and the Rebooting of Reality TV's Past
Amanda Ann Klein (East Carolina University, USA)
15. Girls for Pele: Nostalgia, Precarity, Horror, and Trauma in Paper Girls and Yellowjackets
Kristin Miller (UC Santa Cruz, USA)
16. Buffy's "Slay" Era: Instagram, Escapism, and the Fashion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in an Age of "Perma-Crisis"?
Amelia Morris (University of Exeter, UK)
Index
Product details
| Published | 12 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9798765123126 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 16 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Related Titles
