Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf
Published on 14. October 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-1-108-71322-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'Jacob Jewusiak's Aging, Duration, and the English Novel is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning critical interest in age that the humanities is currently experiencing ... Aging, Duration, and the English Novel successfully demonstrates that scholarly engagement with the category of age can generate interesting new interpretations of well-known works ... [it] makes a valuable contribution not just to literary age studies, but also to ongoing debates within the humanities about the value of recognising age as a master identity on par with gender, race, and class.' Caitlin Doley, BAVS Newsletter '... Jewusiak's book is essential reading for scholars of narrative time, as it establishes provocative discursive ties with some of the best writing on time and the novel in the past twenty years.' Leslie S. Simon, Dickens Quarterly '... offers compelling new approaches to the study of age and aging in nineteenth-century literature.' David McAllister, Victorian StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 152 mm
Width: 228 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
336 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-71322-1 (9781108713221)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
12/2019
Cambridge University Press
€132.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
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.
Content
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.