Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

The aesthetics of senescence, aging, population, and the nineteenth-century British novel, Andrea Charise

eng

no index present

non fiction

The aesthetics of senescence

dictionaries

Andrea Charise

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

aging, population, and the nineteenth-century British novel

Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience. The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise's grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel-a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged. At the University of Toronto Scarborough, Andrea Charise is Assistant Professor in both the Department of English and in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health and Society

adult