| In this dissertation I argue that old age, its material facts and its aesthetic representations, have a distinct history. Through the work of demographers, social scientists, physicians and politicians, old age and the elderly subject were invented at the end of the nineteenth century in the discourses around state sponsored pension schemes, mandatory retirement acts, the new sciences of gerontology and geriatrics, and demographic shifts that suggested an aging of the population. As old age became more and more a possible norm and less an exception, modernist novelists from Henry James to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, turned to older protagonists to explore the possibilities for the aging human subject in the twentieth century. While the classic bildungsromanae , the novels of Austen, Scott, Balzac, Flaubert and Dickens, often explored the life and interests of youth (education, marriage, vocation), the introspective novels of the twentieth century center on older protagonists who remember and reminisce after the activities traditional to a life have been accomplished. The textual practices and innovations of modernism reflect an apprehension and an appreciation of this overwhelming aging population in their concern with time, consciousness, alienation, fragmentation and debility. Through a reading of some major modernist novels, I show how the cultural history of old age is given form by modernist aesthetics. |
