Aging, Duration, and the English Novel

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-108-49917-0
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 120, 358 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 408 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

The rapid onset of dementia after an illness, the development of gray hair after a traumatic loss, the sudden appearance of a wrinkle in the brow of a spurned lover. The realist novel uses these conventions to accelerate the process of aging into a descriptive moment, writing the passage of years on the body all at once. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel argues that the formal disappearance of aging from the novel parallels the ideological pressure to identify as being young by repressing the process of growing old. The construction of aging as a shameful event that should be hidden - to improve one's chances on the job market or secure a successful marriage - corresponds to the rise of the long novel, which draws upon the temporality of the body to map progress and decline onto the plots of nineteenth-century British modernity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jewusiak, Jacob

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Aging theory; 2. No plots for old men; 3. Life after the marriage plot; 4. A wrinkle in time; 5. The technology age; 6. Gray modernism.

Über Autor(innen)

Jewusiak, Jacob
Jacob Jewusiak is a Lecturer in Victorian literature at Newcastle University. His work has appeared in the journals ELH, Textual Practice, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, SEL, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.