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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jacob Jewusiak
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Narrating Aging theorizes duration and the conventions of realism through an analysis of representations of old age and aging, especially through the way novelists plot the development of characters over time. Instead of conceptualizing old age as a state or a stage, this book analyzes the entanglement of narrative duration with biological and cultural accounts of the human lifespan, privileging temporal continuity over the sedimentation of life into categories such as youth, adulthood, and old age. This critical reorientation demonstrates the potential for age studies to address what Catherine Gallagher and Caroline Levine identify as the most undertheorized aspect of the novel form: its duration. The Victorian novel, I argue, constructs a modern sense of duration by grafting the biological process of aging onto the era’s most elongated form, which shapes and is shaped by the imagination of how a body endures through time. Critical attention to the temporal form of the novel reveals a series of connected political problems for aging and the elderly, which this book analyzes through aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture such as aging masculinity, “redundant” women, queer sexuality, and dystopia.
Author(s): Jewusiak J
Series Editor(s): Gillian Beer
Publication type: Authored Book
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Year: 2019
Online publication date: 01/11/2019
Acceptance date: 15/09/2018
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615501
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781108615501
