This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

Chapter 3 examines the connections with the front through the support to local soldiers and the arrival of war victims, highlighting the dialectics of the war’s absence and presence in a city at the rear. The city functioned as a dynamic space, not in any way sealed off from the realities of war. Local solidarity played a major role in wartime mobilization, as evidenced by the gifts sent to absent soldiers. The commemoration of war dead without bodies and the requisition of church bells marked the changes in mourning rituals. The cityscape underwent visible transformations due to the arrival of both wounded soldiers and refugees from the East fleeing the Russian advance. Both groups brought home the destruction and suffering created by the war Austria–Hungary was fighting. Initial support from the authorities and the population soon gave way to fears of epidemics and growing hostility in the case of the refugees.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

Chapter 2 looks at soldier tourism. This chapter argues that perhaps no other British or Dominion soldiers during the war embodied the dual identity of soldier-tourist more than those who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. Soldiers were keen to tour the sites of Old and New Testament Christianity, ancient Egypt, Islam, and the non-western world’s cosmopolitan, multicultural cities, such as Alexandria, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Salonika. Yet, almost to a man, they were left disappointed by what they saw. Utilising historian Gabriel Liulevicius’ idea of the ‘imperial mindscape’, which he used to explain how German soldiers encountered and interacted with Eastern Europe on the Eastern Front, this chapter argues that British and Dominion soldiers in the Middle East and Macedonia did much the same. British and Dominion soldiers offered a ‘prescription’, a fix, for the problems of poor civil infrastructure, shoddy architecture, filth and squalor, and immoral commercial practices that seemed to them to dominate everywhere from Alexandria to Salonika; that fix was some form of British imperial rule or influence. As this chapter demonstrates, what soldiers saw while touring the Middle East and Macedonia directly contributed to how they found meaning in being away from the Western Front.