Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
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Heike Hartung
Abstract
The focus of the essay is the question how the genre of fantasy affects age narratives in terms of the representation of old age. Analyzing George McDonald’s “Little Daylight” (1864), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The curious case of Benjamin Button” (1921), I will argue that the mode of the fantastic serves to open up alternative visions of time and ageing. These age fantasies serve different cultural functions, both by reinforcing contemporary age stereotypes and by envisioning possible counter-narratives of old age. On a discursive level, I will compare the problems with representing old age, its contradictions and ambiguities, to the internal oppositions of the fantastic genre.
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Articles in the same Issue
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- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
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- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
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- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Introduction: Experimental literature and narrative theory
- Perturbatory narration in literature und film
- Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
- Eighteen hours of salmon: On the narrativity of slow TV
- A “fucked up” novel, narratology, and the Difference approach to literary fiction
- Framing absence: A narratology of the empty page
- “Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature
- Who says? Problematic narration in Paul Auster’s City of glass
- The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”
- Fantastic reversals of time: Representations of ageing in the fantastic mode
