-
No Plots for Old Men
- Author(s):
- Jacob Jewusiak (see profile)
- Date:
- 2013
- Group(s):
- LLC Victorian and Early-20th-Century English
- Subject(s):
- Aging--Study and teaching, English fiction, Nineteenth century, Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Age studies, Victorian novel, Charles Dickens, Narrative and time
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6WD3Q14J
- Abstract:
- This article argues that old men and aging raised a central problem for Charles Dickens's literary project: the novel's difficulty of representing temporal continuity over long spans of time. For the old man, the meaningful plots of the nineteenth century—such as the bildungsroman or the marriage plot—are behind him. By examining three of Dickens's early novels—The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), and A Christmas Carol (1843)—this article shows how old men are excluded from the youthful plot of development that served as a narrative means of understanding the bewildering progress of a modernizing society. No longer the subject of the plot and yet bound by the pressures of ambition, the elderly male engages in a narrative compulsion that underlines the tremendous imaginative power of what has been left behind by both the realist novel and the modernity it represents. By doing so, the old man serves as the site through which Dickens addresses an impasse of the novel form, where its duration is marked by its inability to faithfully represent the texture of passing time.
- Notes:
- Winner of NAVSA’s 2013 Donald Gray Prize
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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