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  3. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel
  • Cited by 13
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2019
Print publication year:
2019
Online ISBN:
9781108615501
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108615501
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (120)
Information

Book 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

‘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 Source: 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 Source: Dickens Quarterly

‘… offers compelling new approaches to the study of age and aging in nineteenth-century literature.’

David McAllister Source: Victorian Studies

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