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  • Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age by Sari Edelstein
  • Katherine Adams
Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. By Sari Edelstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xi + 201 pp. $75.00 cloth.

Although age studies came to literary scholarship later than other identity-based frameworks, it now represents an established subfield with its own journal—Age Culture Humanities—and an expanding body of research on how life stages have been imagined and inhabited over time. Scholars of old age including Devony Looser, Valerie Lipscomb, and Lawrence Switzky have built on Kathleen Woodward's early work, while Kay Heath and Anne Wyatt-Brown have shed light on middle age. Interest in childhood and adolescence continues to grow—especially among early Americanists—thanks to pioneering work from Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Anna Mae Duane, Robin Bernstein, and Sarah Chinn. While examining particular age constructs, however, critics have been slower to consider the construct of age itself or its operation as an encompassing system of meanings, metric of value, and biopolitical instrument. This is where Sari Edelstein seeks to intervene with Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. Focusing on the nineteenth-century United States, Edelstein maps the formation of distinct age categories and teleological models of development, and of myriad norms, entitlements, responsibilities, and constraints associated with them. She tracks this emergent "age culture" across multiple institutions—law, politics, medicine, the family, the market; and she finds a wide array of responses from literary culture (1). Imaginative writing, Edelstein argues, became a crucial site of resistance to [End Page 172] age's disciplinary logics during the nineteenth century. As its title promises, Adulthood and Other Fictions contributes to exploration of specific life stages. But it avoids reifying these as discrete categories, coherent unto themselves, warning that this approach contributes to the hegemonic effects of "age essentialism" (131). Edelstein's readings foreground how age concepts are constituted contingently, in play with each other and with other rubrics of ascribed identity. Like Caroline Levander, Edelstein contends that age's seeming neutrality—its guise of biological inevitability—helps naturalize and police other identity rubrics. Applying this insight to age-as-system, she shows how narratives about maturation and senescence reinforced race and gender hierarchies and (re)productive mandates. Adulthood and Other Fictions proposes that deconstructing age will enable us to rethink our assumptions about bodies, power, belonging, and futurity. Indeed, the study is premised on belief that we continue to inhabit this "age culture" today and that nineteenth-century literature offers resources for critical and creative noncompliance (1).

Following its incisive, briskly paced introduction, Adulthood and Other Fictions focuses on detailed close readings paired with analyses of cultural formations ranging from birthday celebrations to gerontological fashion. Literary selections rarely stray from canonical texts and authors, but by incorporating so many Edelstein demonstrates that age really can be found "hiding in plain sight" throughout the nineteenth-century archive (14). Chapter 1, which also focuses significant attention on Pierre and "Bartleby," reads Melville's Redburn as an anti-Bildungsroman, arguing that the novel refuses to plot masculine maturation as a process of "lockstep linear advancement" toward capitalist acquisition and heteronormative closure (35). Examining popular depictions of bourgeois male development in visual narratives like Thomas Cole's 1842 Voyage of Life series, Edelstein finds that Melville links such models of the human life cycle to contemporary visions of national progress, aligning "the unnatural violence of development" scripted for boys like Redburn and Harry Bolton with the destructive advance of westward expansion (37). Chapter 2 shrewdly offsets this account of oppressed white masculinity by turning to slave narratives and episodes including the shipyard attack in Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. Where Melville rejects the "life voyage" as confining template, Douglass "is brutalized for daring to partake in the possibilities of the ship," exposing maturation as a closely guarded racial privilege (44). Working with antebellum ledgers, Edelstein demonstrates how enslaved people's numerical age was correlated to market rather than social value. This prefaces a discussion of freedpeople's claims to "extraordinary aging" in Federal Writers Project interviews ("he is positive he...

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