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Zusatztext This book contains real insights into the literary representation of older people in the nineteenth century. Informationen zum Autor Karen Chase is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is author of Eros and Psyche: Representations of Personality in Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and George Eliot; Middlemarch (Cambridge Landmarks in World Literature Series); coauthor (with Michael Levenson) of The Spectacle of Intimacy (2000); and editor of Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (2005). Klappentext Karen Chase examines old age as it was constructed in Victorian social and literary cultures. Beginning with the vexed relation between elderly people whose numbers and needs taxed the state which sought to identify, classify, and provide for them, she analyzes illuminating moments in narrative form, social policy, or cultural attitudes. The book considers the centrality of institutions and of the generational divide; it traces the power and powerlessness of age through a range of characters and individuals as distinct from one another as Dickens's inebriated nurse, Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; and it studies specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions attached to aging and the complexities of representing age in pictorial and statistical 'portraits'. Chapters are organized around major literary works set alongside episodes and artifacts, diaries and memoirs, images and inscriptions, that produced (and now illuminate) the construction of old age through Victoria's long reign. Zusammenfassung This book studies the social and literary conditions which helped construct the experience of old age in the Victorian period. Taking exemplary texts and situating them within relevant cultural episodes, the book recreates the drama of the aged struggling for rights and recognition in a world that would have preferred to grant invisibility. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction 1: Faces and Spaces: Locating Age in the Dickens World 2: Almshouse to Empire; What is 'Enough' for Old Age 3: Creases and Crevices, Heights and Depths: Narrative Extremities and Age 4: Victoria to Victorian: The Queen and Her Age 5: Artistic Investigations and the Elderly Subject 6: The Politics of Personality of Age at the Fin de Siècle 7: Gravestones, Obituaries, Epitaphs Coda ...
