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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 towomen and people of color.More than simply adding age to the list of identity categories that have become de rigueur 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 inthis 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 both structure and limit the lives of individuals at all points on the age continuum.Ultimately, the volume 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.

American literature --- Adulthood in literature. --- Age in literature --- History and criticism. --- United States --- Social conditions --- Adulthood in literature --- History and criticism --- E-books

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In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building.

Adulthood in literature. --- Middle age in literature. --- English fiction --- History and criticism.

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Books and reading --- Adulthood in literature. --- Children in literature. --- Children's stories, English --- English literature --- Childhood in literature --- Children in poetry --- History --- History and criticism.

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In this groundbreaking and wide-ranging study, Teresa Michals explores why some books originally written for a mixed-age audience, such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, eventually became children's literature, while others, such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, became adult novels. Michals considers how historically specific ideas about age shaped not only the readership of novels, but also the ways that characters are represented within them. Arguing that age is first understood through social status, and later through the ideal of psychological development, the book examines the new determination of authors at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Henry James, to write for an audience of adults only. In these novels and in their reception, a world of masters and servants became a world of adults and children.

Comparative literature --- Fiction --- English literature --- Thematology --- anno 1700-1799 --- anno 1800-1899 --- Adulthood in literature. --- Children in literature. --- English fiction --- Children's literature, English --- Books and reading --- Children --- History and criticism --- History and criticism. --- History --- History. --- American fiction --- Children's literature --- Childhood in literature --- Children in poetry --- Appraisal of books --- Books --- Choice of books --- Evaluation of literature --- Literature --- Reading, Choice of --- Reading and books --- Reading habits --- Reading public --- Reading --- Reading interests --- Reading promotion --- Appreciation --- Appraisal --- Evaluation