Adulthood and Other Fictions
Adulthood and Other Fictions
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成人和其他小说
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发表时间：
2018
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通讯作者：
S. Edelstein
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作者：
S. Edelstein
虽然儿童研究领域近年来蓬勃发展，但很少有学者将年龄问题作为阅读美国文学的视角，从更广泛的角度出发。《成人期和其他小说》展示了十九世纪一系列不同的作家、思想家和艺术家如何应对社会和政治生活中按时间顺序排列的年龄的上升。在一个世纪的过程中，人口普查增加了年龄；学校按年龄组组织；生日贺卡大量生产；老年病学成为一种医学专业。《成人期和其他小说》把美国文学看作是对现代时代文化的丰富、批判性的描述，它考察了我们最著名的作家是如何接受--而且往往是抵制--年龄预期的，特别是当它们适用于女性和有色人种的时候。除了简单地将年龄添加到已经成为学术关注的必备地点的身份类别清单之外，成人和其他小说认为，这些社会位置(种族、性别、性取向、阶级)的其他衡量标准很大程度上是通过年龄定义的看似更自然、更重要的身份认同来辨认的。也就是说，关于成熟和发展的长期文化理想支撑着异性恋、种族、民族主义和资本主义的意识形态，从这个意义上说，年龄修辞是我们最普遍的纪律话语之一。包括路易莎·梅·奥尔科特、弗雷德里克·道格拉斯和亨利·詹姆斯在内的作家预见到了我们这个时代的年龄歧视，但他们也认识到年龄规范是如何在年龄连续体的各个时间点构建和限制个人生活的。归根结底，《成人期》和其他小说主张对年龄的跨学科理解，挑战美国人对成年的幻想和美国身份本身对独立和自主的颂扬。
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 rigeur 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 structure, and limit, the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum. Ultimately, Adulthood and Other Fictions 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.