Abstract
Over the past decade, several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017). Following the publication of two significant new monographs — Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence (2020) and Jacob Jewusiak’s Aging, Duration, and the English Novel (2019) — the time is ripe for a synthesis of this dynamic cluster of scholarship, with special attention to where nineteenth-century perspectives on ageing is going, and ought to go, from here. Recorded in January 2020, this roundtable is a curated compilation of conversations with key scholars in the field: Devoney Looser (Arizona State University), David McAllister (Birkbeck, University of London), Ruth M. McAdams (Skidmore College), Jake Jewusiak (Newcastle University), and Travis Chi Wing Lau (Kenyon College). Edited by Andrea Charise, this roundtable assembles new perspectives on the present and future of nineteenth-century studies of age(ing), including: What’s next for age studies’ approaches to reading and teaching nineteenth-century texts? How might a better understanding of ‘old’ models inform our current day concerns with ageing populations and intergenerational discord? Can age studies research help make a case for the enduring role of the arts and humanities in a STEM-dominated culture? And how might attending to the old, ageing, and obsolete help address newly emergent global crises, including the rise of populism and climate change? Accessible in both audio format and textual transcription, this roundtable interview offers a timely resource for researchers, students, and a broader public interested in the literary present and futures of ageing and older age.
Highlights
Over the past decade, several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017)
My name is Andrea Charise and I am delighted to be your host for a multimedia contribution to the journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
This special issue of 19 features a range of age studies approaches to nineteenthcentury literature: a timely topic for literary and historical research in this period
Summary
Several academic studies have taken nineteenth-century ageing as their topic, including Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain (2008), Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (2009), Kay Heath’s Aging by the Book (2009), and Alice Crossley’s special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2017). That’s perhaps one of the overarching ways that I’m really interested in the way those kinds of thinking about history seem to animate the postmodern condition, or maybe just, like, the contemporary twenty-first century condition.
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