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• W3207660768 abstract "Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise Amy Culley (bio) Andrea Charise. The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. New York: SUNY Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $95 hardcover. This is a vibrant moment for studies of age, aging, and older age in the nineteenth century, a period recognized for crucial transitions in what it means to grow older and with important legacies for contemporary debates about late life. Andrea Charise’s The Aesthetics of Senescence makes a valuable contribution to this scholarship in its skillful movement across disciplinary and period borders. As Charise observes, “aging’s compulsory combination of ideology and biology makes Age Studies an intensely interdisciplinary field” (xxii) and this insight underpins the book’s rich discussion of the intersections between literary, medical, scientific, philosophical, economic, and demographic discourses. The focus is the cultural politics of aging in the literary imagination, explored through detailed analysis of nineteenth-century writers’ responses to the reconceptualization of “older age as a biopolitical state of life” (xxiv), defined in both medical and political terms and informed by new understandings of population, aging bodies, and age cohorts. As the title suggests, the book also considers the aesthetic implications of this alternative to an implicitly Christian model of lifespan (based on inevitable steps or stages). Instead, aging is understood as a fluid and conditional state that one could “enter, languish in, exist in, or reverse” (30), thereby prompting a new “aesthetics of aging, longevity, life-course, and even life-extension” (xxiv). This original approach to the nineteenth-century novel, an aesthetic form traditionally marked by its association with youth and the bildungsroman, engenders new insights into familiar authors, particularly William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, George Gissing, and Anthony Trollope, who form the central literary case studies of the book. Conversely, Charise demonstrates the value of literary discourses for gerontology in her convincing claim that the novel is “an ideal form for historicizing changing [End Page 357] senses of human temporality” and for “grappl[ing] with the complex heteroglossia of human aging” (xxxviii). The book’s long nineteenth-century perspective (in contrast to the recent focus on the Victorian period in studies of aging) also enables an illuminating discussion of literary inheritance across the generations through tracing Romantic-Victorian interactions. The book’s starting point is the end of the eighteenth century, identified as a watershed moment in conceptions of aging through the conflict between William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). As the opening chapter reveals, Godwin is a philosophical and literary writer whose potential for age studies has been largely overlooked. In a section of Political Justice entitled “Of Health, and the Prolongation of Human Life” Godwin adopts a position of utopian optimism to suggest that old age might be eradicated by the powers of the mind. The text exhibits what Charise identifies as “ageist distain” (7) as the tyranny of time’s effects on the aging body are read as analogous to the debilitating effects of arbitrary government. St. Leon (1799), written a year after Malthus’s stinging attack on Godwin’s radical idealism, is interpreted by Charise as Godwin’s fictional corrective of his earlier position. By reading St. Leon through the lens of aging, she argues that the novel’s exposition of the disastrous effects of immortality (which produces a life of stasis, repetition, regression, and rigidity of thought) establishes the process of aging as integral to human perfectibility. The apparent idiosyncrasies of St. Leon are illuminated by its contextualization alongside contemporary medical discourses and longevity literature. In addition, returning to the “aesthetics of senescence,” the novel is regarded as a speculative fiction that gives innovative literary expression to an unbounded lifespan and understands age as a state, thereby creating an open-ended alternative to the bildungsroman of maturation. The interconnectivity between generations is played out in chapter two in both biographical and literary terms in the focus on Mary Shelley and her fictional reactions to Godwinian and Malthusian models of aging. Charise explores Shelley’s critique of Romantic valorizations of youth..." @default.
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• W3207660768 title "The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise" @default.
• W3207660768 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2021.0023" @default.
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