Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age

The nineteenth century saw the rise of chronological age as a crucial component of US social and political life: age was added to the census in 1850; 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 examines how our most well-known writers registeredDLand often resistedDLage expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color. As this book shows, writers including Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James used literature as a space to imagine alternative ideas about aging and to challenge conventional definitions of adulthood.