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The Victorians and Old Age
Karen Chase
304 pages
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26 black-and-white halftones
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234x156mm
978-0-19-956436-1
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Hardback
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04 June 2009
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- A wide-ranging account of old age in the Victorian period by a senior scholar
- Provides detailed studies of writing on old age by Dickens, Trollope, Gaskell, Oliphant, Wilde, Carroll, and Morris
- Strong interdisciplinary interest - draws deeply on the visual arts, scientific and political thought, the life of Queen Victoria herself, and the culture of the times
- Includes numerous illustrations
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 artefacts, diaries and memoirs, images and inscriptions, that produced (and now illuminate) the construction of old age through Victoria's long reign.
The Victorians and Old Age shows that if old age became for the Victorians such a conspicuous public topic and problem, it also became an intensely private preoccupation. The social formation of old age created terms, images, and narratives that lone individuals used to fashion the stories of their lives. The book is intent to respect the specificity of aging: not only the wide diversities of circumstance (rich and poor, urban and rural,
watched and forgotten, powerful and dispossessed) but also the distinct acts of representation by novelists, painters, journalists, sociologists, and diary-keepers.Readership: Students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Victorian period; those with an interest in old age
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Karen Chase, Professor of English, University of Virginia
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"she presents insightful illustrations... This is cultural analysis of a high order, far-ranging and scrupulous, humane and imaginative" - A. R. Vogeler, CHOICE "The analyses of these representations of old age are sophisticated, nuanced and stimulating" - Nigel Goose, LPS "very professional and thoughtful" - Olwen Hufton, Literature and History "Chase's book adds substantially to emerging scholarship in age studies by considering old age in the rich context of Victorian literature and culture" - Devoney Looser, The Review of English Studies "This book contains real insights into the literary representation of older people in the nineteenth
century."
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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
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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