| dc.description.abstract | This study investigates how various age metaphors from a vampire to mandatory
euthanasia function to invalidate linear progressions of both individuals and society in fin-desiècle
British literature. It explains how and why many fictional narratives spoke about forceful
aspects of not only personal aging but also collective degeneration at the end of the nineteenth
century, a time period in which anxieties about the collapse of the old system of belief in
modernity and progress mingled with hopes about the arrival of a new way of thinking about
man and society. Likening the condition of late Victorian England to old age, this study places
the nation’s age consciousness in the fin-de-siècle context of degeneration. The study analyzes
how fin-de-siècle age narratives problematize Victorian Britain’s attempts to keep secure its
national persona as a young self with strong potential for unstoppable progress. In particular, the
study theorizes the ways in which fin-de-siècle age narratives deconstruct a normal aging process
and discover signs of elderliness within modern England in imaginatively testing the possibility
of national regeneration. Ultimately, it argues that fin-de-siècle age narratives question the
ideological boundary separating youth and progress from old age and decline and thus give their
readers a chance to contemplate the shared reality, marked by both anxieties of degeneration and
hopes of regeneration.
Through the lens of age, this dissertation examines four different subgenres of late
nineteenth-century fiction—Gothic, imperial adventure, New Woman, and speculative fiction—
and touches on early twentieth-century children’s fiction. Reading how these genres explore
what it means to be old and/or young for the British Empire itself and for its subjects, the
dissertation brings into focus the ways in which they present a new sense of temporality, which
is a nonlinear mixture of the nation’s past, present, and future. Specifically, the dissertation
discusses literary texts written by Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Sarah Grand,
Eliza Lynn Linton, H. G. Wells, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, and Edith
Nesbit. Looking at these authors’ depictions of the blurred relationship between youth and age,
the dissertation suggests that at the turn of the century the heightened anxiety about decline was a
driving force behind the production of the nonlinear multilayered temporality. | en |
