Adulthood and Other Fictions

American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

Sari Edelstein

Introduces age as an analytical category for reading American literature and offers new readings of well-known US literary texts by writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James
Demonstrates that adulthood functions as an ideological instrument as much as a biological imperative
Argues for an intersectional understanding of age and exposes how discourses of age—especially when applied to women and African Americans—were marshalled to reinforce social hierarchies

Adulthood and Other Fictions

American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

Sari Edelstein

Description

While the field of childhood studies has blossomed in recent years, few scholars have taken up the question of age more broadly as a lens for reading American literature. Adulthood and Other Fictions shows how a diverse array of nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and artists responded to the rise of chronological age in social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. Adulthood and Other Fictions reads American literature as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, and it examines how our most well-known writers registered and often resisted age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color.

More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigueur sites of scholarly attention, Adulthood and Other Fictions argues that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age. That is, longstanding cultural ideals about maturity and development anchor ideologies of heterosexuality, race, nationalism, and capitalism, and in this sense, age rhetoric serves as one of our most pervasive disciplinary discourses. Writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James anticipated the ageism of our moment, but they also recognized how age norms both structure and limit the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, the volume argues for an intersectional understanding of age that challenges the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in US fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.

Adulthood and Other Fictions

American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

Sari Edelstein

Introduction
1. 'May I Never Be a Man': Immaturity in Melville's America
2. Peculiar Forms of Aging in the Literature of US Slavery
3. Little Women, Overgrown Children, and the Problem of Female Maturity
4. Over the Hill and Out of Sight: Locating Old Age in Regionalism
5. Beyond Mastery: Undoing Adulthood in the Work of Henry James
Coda

Adulthood and Other Fictions

American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

Sari Edelstein

Author Information

Sari Edelstein, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Sari Edelstein teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing (2014), and her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous academic journals, including American Literature, Legacy, ESQ, and Studies in American Fiction.

Adulthood and Other Fictions

American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

Sari Edelstein

Reviews and Awards

"Adulthood and Other Fictions represents a learned, rigorous, and eloquent theorization of age in America -- highly impressive in its own right, and conducive to future advances along the same line." -- Matthew Redmond, Journal of American Studies

"Adulthood and Other Fictions is groundbreaking, ambitious, and likely to be very influential. It was a pleasure to read, and I believe that we will be continuing to assess and explore its ideas for a long time to come." -- Rachael McLennan, American Literary History

"While carefully locating her own work in relation to queer theory, disability studies, and chronobiopolitics, among other fields, she also provisions future scholarship on the subject of age... Adulthood and Other Fictions represents a learned, rigorous, and eloquent theorization of age in America – highly impressive in its own right, and conducive to future advances along the same line." -- Matthew Redmond, Journal of American Studies

"Edelstein both contextualizes her subject within 19th-century American ideals such as self-reliance and independence and successfully lays the groundwork for others to fill in and expand her exploration of age within the American oeuvre." -- S. Batcos, CHOICE

"... engages readers on an illuminating journey through nineteenth-century literature" -- Ellyn Lem, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Age, Culture, Humanities

"Adulthood and Other Fictions presents a compelling cultural history of age that promises to interest scholars from across the humanities and the social sciences ... Any of the book's chapters would teach well in graduate and advanced undergraduate literature courses. The readings are sure-footed, deeply informed by historical and critical context. Moving through diverse texts and cultural settings, they establish age as a supple frame of analysis." -- Katherine Adams, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers

"Adulthood and Other Fictions has much to offer the fields of age studies and nineteenth-century American literature but also queer theory, feminism, and disability studies. Edelstein's intersectional approach reveals age as a missing link that invigorates established arguments about discipline and power in these fields." -- Hannah Herndon, Tufts University, Modern Language Review

"In this beautifully written book, rife with sharp observations, Edelstein contributes to the growing body of scholarship on cultural constructions of age, adulthood, and life stages. Her book will particularly appeal to American cultural historians and literary scholars." -- Renée M. Sentilles, Case Western Reserve University, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth