Narratives of Aging in the Long Nineteenth Century

An Introduction

Authors

  • Alice Crossley University of Lincoln
  • Amy Culley University of Lincoln

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v5i.130861

Keywords:

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Abstract

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Author Biographies

Alice Crossley, University of Lincoln

is a Senior Lecturer in English (University of Lincoln, UK). Her research focuses on intersections between age and masculinity in texts primarily by Victorian and modernist writers. In the field of aging studies, her work includes Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction (Routledge, 2018), an edited special issue in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017), and an article on asynchronicity and aging queerly in the fiction of Israel Zangwill (forthcoming, 2021). In addition, she has published chapters on childhood and nostalgia in W. M. Thackeray (Routledge, 2016), the Victorian schoolboy body (EUP, 2018), and eroticized intergenerationality (Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 2017). She is currently working on a new book, Old Fashioning: Aging and Masculinity in Western Fiction, 1840-1930, which interrogates the representation of aging masculinity in a number of popular and less well-established writers. A concurrent project explores senescent male sexuality in the work of Japanese writers Jun’ichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata. She also works on nineteenth-century valentines and material cultures.

Amy Culley, University of Lincoln

is a Senior Lecturer in English (University of Lincoln, UK). Her research interests are in women’s writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, life writing, and aging studies. She is currently working on her second book, On Growing Old: Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850, supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2020). She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760-1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor, with Daniel Cook, of Women’s Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Palgrave, 2012), and co-editor, with Anna Fitzer, of Editing Women’s Writing, 1670-1840 (Routledge, 2017). She is also the editor of volumes 1-4 of Women’s Court and Society Memoirs (Pickering and Chatto, 2009).

References

Boehm, Katharina, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, editors. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Routledge, 2014.

Charise, Andrea. The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. State University of New York Press, 2020.

Chase, Karen. The Victorians and Old Age. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Crossley, Alice. Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction: George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. Routledge, 2018.

—. Guest editor. “Special issue, Age and Gender: Aging in the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2017.

Fallon, David and Jonathon Shears. Guest editors. “Special issue, Romanticism and Ageing.” Romanticism, vol. 25, no. 3, 2019.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton University Press, 1998.

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Aged by Culture.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin, Routledge, 2015, pp. 21-28.

—. “The New Era of Longevity Discovered, 1869-1929: The Shock of Women’s Midlife Strength and the Construction of Gender Envy.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2017. ncgsjournal.com/issue132/grisham.htm.

Hartung, Heike. Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. Routledge, 2016.

Hepworth, Mike. “Framing Old Age: Sociological Perspectives on Ageing in Victorian Painting.” The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, edited by David Inglis and John Hughson, Palgrave, 2005, pp. 113-38.

Jewusiak, Jacob. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Katz, Stephen. “What is Age Studies?” Age, Culture, Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 17-23. ageculturehumanities.org/WP/what-is-age-studies/. Accessed 26 November 2020.

Looser, Devoney. “Age and Aging.” The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period, edited by Devoney Looser, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 169-82.

—. “Age and Aging Studies, From Cradle to Grave.” Age, Culture, Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 25-29. ageculturehumanities.org/WP/age-and-aging-studies-from-cradle-to-grave/. Accessed 26 November 2020.

—. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

Newbon, Pete. The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth Century. Palgrave, 2018.

Ottaway, Susannah R. The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Small, Helen. The Long Life. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Thane, Pat. Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Troyansky, David. Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France. Cornell University Press, 1989.

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Published

2021-01-01

How to Cite

Crossley, A., and A. Culley. “Narratives of Aging in the Long Nineteenth Century: An Introduction”. Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 5, Jan. 2021, pp. 1-13, doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v5i.130861.

Issue

Vol. 5 (2021): Age, Culture, Humanities (special issue: Narratives of Aging in the Nineteenth Century)

Section

Research Article

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