Aging, Duration, and the English Novel

Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf

von Jacob Jewusiak

224 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

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.

• Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Themen: Biographie, Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft Geschichte und Kritik Literaturwissenschaft, allgemein 1800 bis 1900
• ISBN: 9781108713221
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.10.2021
• Größe: 152 x 228 mm
• Verlag: Cambridge University Press