Constituting old age in early modern English literature, from Queen Elizabeth to King Lear / Christopher Martin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martin, Christopher, 1957-

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Massachusetts studies in early modern culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

Old age in literature.

Aging in literature.

Intergenerational relations in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 221 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2012]

Summary:

How Did Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, whose works mark the last quarter century of Elizabeth I's reign as one of the richest moments in all of English literature, regard and represent old age? Was late life seen primarily as a time of withdrawal and preparation for death, as scholars and historians have traditionally maintained? In this book, Christopher Martin examines how, contrary to received impressions, writers and thinkers of the era-working in the shadow of the kinetic, long-lived queen herself-contested such prejudicial and dismissive social attitudes.

In late Tudor England, Martin argues, competing definitions of and regard for old age established a deeply conflicted frontier between external, socially "constituted" beliefs and a developing sense of an individual's "constitution" or physical makeup, a usage that entered the language in the mid-1500s. This space was further complicated by internal divisions within the opposing camps. On one side, reverence for the elder's authority, rooted in religious and social convention, was persistently challenged by the discontents of an ambitious younger underclass. Simultaneously, the aging subject grounded an enduring social presence and dignity on a bodily integrity that time inevitably threatened. In a historical setting that saw both the extended reign of an aging monarch and a resulting climate of acute generational strife, this network of competition and accommodation uniquely shaped late Elizabethan literary imagination. Through fresh readings of signature works, genres, and figures, Martin redirects critical attention to this neglected aspect of early modern studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Age, agency, and early modern constitutions

Elizabeth I's politics of longevity

Out to pasture: the bucolic elder in Spenser, Sidney, and their heirs

Gerontophobia and late Elizabethan poetry: "old strange thinges"

"Confin'd to exhibition": King Lear through the spectacles of age

Epilogue: figures of retire.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781558499737

1558499733

9781558499720

1558499725

OCLC:

794709420