Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Simon, Leslie S

Titel

Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf by Jacob Jewusiak (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2021-09, Vol.38 (3), p.337-341

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The theoretical underpinnings of the book, informed by the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, make provocative assertions about age as a continuum (almost spatial in form) where different versions of the self in time coexist, "palimpsest-like" (33): "The duration of the human life is not marked by ruptures, whether biological (puberty) or cultural (sixtyfive marking retirement age), but shot through in its entirety with past and future qualities" (30). According to the "demographic imagination" of the Victorians, "individuals past their mid-sixties" were considered a "relentless drain on the economy" (7). [...]growing old was pushed to the margins of an era that defined itself through the productivity of industry and the virility of empire" (4), with novels channeling these cultural imperatives into youthful characters, metaphors, and plots. [...]to Martin Chuzzlewit, who possesses an obstinate virility that flies in the face of age conventions– and he knows it.