Aging, Duration, and the English Novel

Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf

Jacob Jewusiak

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108499170
• eBook ISBN: 9781108599757
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 Novelargues 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Aging Theory
• Chapter 2 No Plots for Old Men
• Chapter 3 Life After the Marriage Plot
• Chapter 4 A Wrinkle in Time
• Chapter 5 The Technology Age
• Chapter 6 Gray Modernism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index