Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists
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Ingrid von Rosenberg
Abstract
Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fictional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever growing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years, have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships. Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past, often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncontemplated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispensable precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’: Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie
- Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists
- The First (and Second) Coming of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
- “All business as usual”: Richard Powers’ Gain and the Complicities of (Re-)Incorporation
- Ian McEwan’s Aesthetic Stakes in Adaptation as Political Rewriting: A Study of Nutshell (2016) and The Cockroach (2019)
- Reviews
- Lilo Moessner. 2020. The History of the Present English Subjunctive: A Corpus-Based Study of Mood and Modality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, xx + 271 pp., 123 tables, 8 figures, £ 85.00.
- Dustin M. Frazier Wood. 2020. Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Medievalism 18. Woodbridge: Boydell. xv + 237 pp., 22 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Emily Kesling. 2020. Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture. Anglo-Saxon Studies 38. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 233 pp., 3 tables, £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
- Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw (eds.). 2020. Cities, Saints, and Communities in Early Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Alan Thacker. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 46. Turnhout: Brepols, 408 pp., 8 figures, 9 tables, 1 map, € 100.00.
- Andrew Kraebel. 2020. Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv + 322 pp., 17 figures, £ 75.00.
- Edurne Garrido-Anes (ed.). 2020. A Middle English Version of the Circa Instans. Edited from Cambridge, CUL, MS Ee.1.13. Middle English Texts 59. Heidelberg: Winter, lvi + 212 pp., 2 illustr., € 70.00.
- Wieland Schwanebeck. 2020. Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York/London: Routledge, xiv + 245 pp., 23 figures, £ 120.00.
- Michael A. Chaney (ed.). 2018. Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of Dave the Potter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 236 pp., 28 illustr., £ 53.00/$ 78.00.
- Rebecca Brückmann. 2021. Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, x + 271 pp., 6 figures, $ 114.95.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’: Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie
- Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in the Late Fiction of Contemporary British Novelists
- The First (and Second) Coming of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
- “All business as usual”: Richard Powers’ Gain and the Complicities of (Re-)Incorporation
- Ian McEwan’s Aesthetic Stakes in Adaptation as Political Rewriting: A Study of Nutshell (2016) and The Cockroach (2019)
- Reviews
- Lilo Moessner. 2020. The History of the Present English Subjunctive: A Corpus-Based Study of Mood and Modality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, xx + 271 pp., 123 tables, 8 figures, £ 85.00.
- Dustin M. Frazier Wood. 2020. Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Medievalism 18. Woodbridge: Boydell. xv + 237 pp., 22 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Emily Kesling. 2020. Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture. Anglo-Saxon Studies 38. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 233 pp., 3 tables, £ 60.00/$ 99.00.
- Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw (eds.). 2020. Cities, Saints, and Communities in Early Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Alan Thacker. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 46. Turnhout: Brepols, 408 pp., 8 figures, 9 tables, 1 map, € 100.00.
- Andrew Kraebel. 2020. Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv + 322 pp., 17 figures, £ 75.00.
- Edurne Garrido-Anes (ed.). 2020. A Middle English Version of the Circa Instans. Edited from Cambridge, CUL, MS Ee.1.13. Middle English Texts 59. Heidelberg: Winter, lvi + 212 pp., 2 illustr., € 70.00.
- Wieland Schwanebeck. 2020. Literary Twinship from Shakespeare to the Age of Cloning. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York/London: Routledge, xiv + 245 pp., 23 figures, £ 120.00.
- Michael A. Chaney (ed.). 2018. Where Is All My Relation? The Poetics of Dave the Potter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 236 pp., 28 illustr., £ 53.00/$ 78.00.
- Rebecca Brückmann. 2021. Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, x + 271 pp., 6 figures, $ 114.95.
