Aging, Duration, and the English Novel

This book argues that the realist novel compresses the duration of aging into descriptive intervals, constructing senescence as a shameful event to be hidden. It will appeal to students and researchers of nineteenth-century literature and culture, the Victorian novel and to those with an interest in representations of age in 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 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.