Critical Approaches to Age in American Literature

Special Issue in Studies in American Fiction 46.2 (2019)

Sari Edelstein and Melanie Dawson, Editors

“This special issue emerges out of our sense that age has long bolstered social inequities in U.S. society and is implicated in some of the most significant inequities of our time, and yet it has largely remained a blind spot in U.S. literary and cultural studies. The field of childhood studies offers a crucial foundation for the analysis of age, directing much-needed attention to the ideological work of childhood and to the lives and cultural productions of real children.” – Sari Edelstein and Melanie Dawson.

Contents

Edelstein, Sari, and Melanie Dawson. “Introduction: Critical Approaches to Age in American Literature.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 159–67.

Hodgson, Lucia. “Age and Consent in Charlotte Temple.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 169–94.

Stuckey, Amanda. “‘Exercises of Their Own Invention’: Reading Age and Disability in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 195–216.

Soderberg, Laura. “Prodigious Births: Black Infancy, Antebellum Medicine, and the Racialization of Heredity.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 217–38.

Baker, Jennifer J. “The Time to Rise: Imagining Black Maturation in Blake.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 239–63.

Wadsworth, Sarah. “‘One Crowded Hour of Glorious Life’: Growing Up and Growing Old in The Awkward Age.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 265–88.

Field, Corinne T. “‘What Does Come after?’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Speculative Sociology of Aging.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 289–320.

Windon, Nathaniel A. “The Slope of the Years: Sister Carrie and Narratives of Aging in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 321–39.

Hainze, Emily. “‘Wayward and Untrained Years’: Reforming the ‘Wayward Girl’ in The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Jennie Gerhardt.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 341–72.

Woodward, Kathleen. “Afterword: Literary Antidotes to the Toxin That Is Ageism.” Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (December 28, 2019): 373–81.