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"The Tyranny of Age": Godwin's St. Leon and the Nineteenth-Century Longevity Narrative
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 79, Number 4, Winter 2012
- pp. 905-933
- 10.1353/elh.2012.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This essay reads William Godwin's novel St. Leon (1799) in relation to contemporaneous medicalizing discourses concerned with the elimination of old age. I argue that in St. Leon, a speculative case study of a disastrously unbounded life, Godwin recants his earlier paean to immortality in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-98) by undermining the solitary subject for whom senescence is a symptom of political tyranny. St. Leon therefore signals an acute transitional moment between late eighteenth-century thought and incipient Romanticism, and marks the first example of the nineteenth-century longevity narrative, wherein the finitude of individual lifespan exists in strained reciprocity with the perpetual succession of species.