Living too long : the extant figure in American literature
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation finds that nineteenth-century American literature and culture organized itself around the fear of living too long. This fear manifests most strikingly in a character type that I call the extant figure: someone who disrupts their environment by refusing to die when expected, their lifespan stretching past the limits of one historical moment and into another where they cannot fully belong. I use the word "character" to encompass not only examples from fiction (Rip Van Winkle, Natty Bumppo, Uncle Julius), but also the speakers of such lyrics as Dickinson's F764 ("My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun"). Behind their differences of genre, mode, and period, these case studies share a preoccupation with the unsettling power of too much longevity. By tracking various permutations of this character type between 1820 and the close of the century, Living Too Long plots a new inroad into America's political and intellectual life during that span. In the extant figure's struggles we may observe a young republic anxiously predicating its continued survival on the concept of timely generational succession, and dreading the possibility of that system breaking down when one generation overextends its reach; an effort to reconcile, or else to transcend, religious and secular models of time, with their different implications for human life; and several successive generations learning gradually to conceive of their own existence as historically embedded. Reading these works against the backdrop of critical studies on race, time consciousness, and nationalism, I argue that age, not youth and innocence, was the prime mover of the period
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Redmond, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Degree committee member | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Degree committee member | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Matthew Redmond |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of English |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021 |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/br363xz6870 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Matthew Redmond
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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