5/26/2023 0 Comments Mrs claremontElderly characters typically appear in supporting roles, and the subjective experience of aging is seldom analyzed in depth. The result is that old age rarely gets adequate representation in the novel. The works of Austen and Dickens may be stuffed with imperious old dowagers and wrinkled eccentrics, but it is Elizabeth Bennet or David Copperfield to whom the story almost always belongs. Their aspirations are licensed, and sometimes wrecked, by a new social order characterized by acceleration, mobility, and change. The heroes and heroines of Goethe, Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, and George Eliot-among many other authors of the novel’s golden age-are young people, striving and yearning. The bildungsroman, or novel of formation, identified youth as “the most meaningful part of life,” as the scholar Franco Moretti has written. Readers and writers found themselves repeatedly drawn to a certain kind of narrative: the coming-of-age story. Instead, one had to make one’s way in life. For members of the growing middle classes, social position was no longer prescribed at birth. The form rose to prominence, in eighteenth-century Europe, because it registered the psychological disruptions of a newly dynamic capitalist world. The novel, as a genre, favors the young over the old.
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